The Dangers of Letting Go

Apparently, your job as a parent isn't learning to raise your kids, it's learning to let go of them. When you have a college freshman and 8^th grader, that reality is a constant companion. I'm finding as I cope with each, that letting go can be both dangerously easy and easily dangerous.

Shannon and I are not overly protective parents. We have lived with a general philosophy of what doesn't kill them will make them stronger. As long as it didn't have a skull and cross bones on the label, we stood back. We both came by that honestly as children in a world that was a lot less risk adverse. As a teenager, I thought nothing of beating the summer heat of the Sacramento Valley by swimming in the " cow pond" over on the Hamm Ranch or taking a cool drink from the cow trough. Shannon rode her horse everywhere, and she and the gang of kids rode dirt bikes with no helmets and swung from a rotten old rope swing into the concrete lined pond. It's a different world from today where poker is considered a sport, and protective eye-wear is encouraged for ping pong.

Our community used to have a harvest fair in the fall. A combination farmers market and street festival, it was a low-key event that brought our eclectic community together one last time before the cold, rainy winter months. A fixture in the community was an old man, known as "Doc" and his team of draft horses. Doc would drive his team around the old elementary school with a wagon loaded with parents and kids. Nolan, Rayna and I went one year—Nolan was six or seven and Rayna three or four. We met some friends from scouts and the boys ran off to throw darts at balloons or do the ring toss, while I stood admiring Doc's team. People were climbing into the wagon and the horses stood waiting. I held Rayna and she reached out to touch the huge team.

"Is it all right?" I called up to Doc. I grew up around farm animals and knew to always ask.
"Sure", he said.
Rayna leaned away from me and planted both hands on the horse's sweaty, muscular shoulder. The horse didn't even flinch.

"You can put her on his back and take a picture, he won't mind," Doc called down, and Rayna was already lifting up one leg as if she knew the offer was coming.

I pushed my little girl--in a white dress, white stockings and pixie haircut-- on to a horse's back that was higher than my six-foot height. Her little legs stuck straight out from the horse's enormous, round back. I told her to hold on to the hames; the big brass balls at the top of two bars that fit to the neck yolk. I stepped back to get out my camera. I heard someone from the back of the wagon yell "all set." Doc said "get up" and the horses stepped forward, side-by-side. Eight hooves, bigger than Rayna's head, rose and fell, striking the ground hard.

"Don't worry, she'll be fine," Doc hollered over the din of the crowd and noise of the horse and wagon.

I stood there, dumb-struck. My mouth fell open and my mind screamed words, but they stuck in my throat. OH. MY. GOD. My eyes scan the ground, certain I would see her slide between the team and under their trampling hooves. 

The course they took was about half a mile long. I could not see Rayna's face, but I could see she was holding on to the hames and staying on the horse. The team turned a corner and I began to think she was fine as long as they did not break into a trot. At that moment, they did just that. I turned away. I could not bear to watch the horrifying sight of my little girl being trampled to death.

My friend Jon stood with me. He watched the slow-motion tragedy unfold. As the team trotted back to the crowd, Jon urged me to "look, she's fine", his voice betraying the relief he felt too. I turned around and saw Rayna still perched where I left her. Her cheeks were flushed and her little hands were red from gripping the cold brass hames. The horse barely stopped when I was by their side, pulling her down.

"Were you scared?" I breathed.
"Nuh, uh", she said.

I hugged her close, and swore I'd never let he go again. She was neither scared nor interested to do it again. Letting her go was so uncontrolled, so easy. It was so easily dangerous.

Nolan will be home in a couple of days for Thanksgiving break. It's the first time he has been home since he left for school in September, and by far his longest time away. I miss him terribly every day, but not like that first week when I would turn myself, and any other parent with a new freshman, in to blubbering fools. We have filled the gap with texts, calls and Skype. I know what he's doing most days, because one of us reaches out to the other.
 
Shannon and I went to a high school play this weekend—Nolan was a fixture in high school drama. It was a good performance; you can tell the parents whose kids have lead roles, they laugh the longest and clap the loudest. As we walked out of the theater, we didn't go back stage to greet and congratulate the actors, as we always had when Nolan was cast. I was melancholy as we walked to the car as I realized we had let go of an important part of what shaped him and made his high school experience so good. But it didn't last long, and Shannon, Rayna and I went home and made popcorn the old-fashioned way—on a pan on the stove, with real melted butter—and watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. In late September I could not have done that.

Letting go of the teenager he was is getting easier. It's always easier to let go of one thing when a better thing is in view. Letting go can get dangerously easy, the result is you drift apart and take years to work your way back.

Then there is Rayna. As a 14-year-old, her job is to begin to be her own person; she is in the beautiful, wonderful, scary, terrible, confusing time of forming her personality. And she is in no particular hurry. She is the most comfortable teenage girl I have ever met. She seems to already know who she is and is perfectly content to let life come at her, and change her, at its own pace. She is brave and incessantly cheerful. She takes what comes for what it is in the moment. She has always just grabbed life by the hames and went along for the ride. This time though, letting go is dangerously easy.

Letting go is difficult. Maybe the hardest thing as a parent is assessing whether it is dangerously easy or easily dangerous.