What I Learned About Parenting When My Sons Left the Nest

This is the season that sons and daughters, after graduating from high school, are moving out of the house. Some are going to work, and others are going to college.

Photo Credit: State Farm, Creative Commons

But they are leaving the place that has been their home, their nest, for 18 years.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I delivered our youngest son to college.

When we returned home that evening, there was a quiet we hadn’t heard before. Prior to that night, for more than twenty-one years, there had been a son living down our hall. I stayed awake a good part of that night, images and memories passing through my mind like shooting stars.

Parenting is all about preparing your children to leave well.

And it takes a long time to get the soil ready for their departure.

The day my first son was born, I walked outside with my tools and began to dig.

I wasn’t sure why I was digging. I’m speaking figuratively of course, but I simply knew I must break into the hard ground to make it something it was not.

I wasn’t digging a hole.

Rather I was preparing a surface, free from obstacles, small and large. Daily I tore into the ground, breaking rocks into small pieces, cutting down trees, and ripping out roots that would eventually find their way to the surface again. Sometimes my boy would work alongside me, not knowing what we were doing or why, but glad to be with me and a part of the task.

(Soon, my second son joined us. This was a huge project!)

I don’t remember the day I realized we were constructing some sort of path.

Perhaps it was when I saw that it was not deep enough for a foundation and too long for a garden.

The path was wide and never meandered. It was smooth and level.

There were difficult days (sprained ankles, fender-benders, and break-ups) when the hills had to be cut through. But time and patience saw them open wide.

And then, a little more than eighteen years after I began this project, I realized what it was. It was when he began to gather his things in boxes.

And one by one, placed them at the spot where my work began.

His belongings were all there—his instruments, his books, his trophies, his mattress—stacked up at the path’s starting point. As he stood there, tall and manly, he looked down the path beyond its end and toward the bright horizon, the sun beaming on his face.

Then it came to me.

There before us was a runway, wide and long and smooth. And he, with an eager heart and a long wingspan, was ready for takeoff.

Both of my sons have made this journey.

Both have worked alongside my wife and I to construct this runway. (Parenting is a group project.) Both have left to return only for visits now. And while my grief is profound, it is overshadowed by gratitude for their tenure with us and by hope for all of the flights to come.

I can hear the pilot’s voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, prepare for liftoff.”

It is a voice I have dreaded since the day my sons entered this world.

And it is a voice that I embrace for all that will be theirs.