Just weeks ago, your baby wanted to be cuddled many times a day. This morning, your toddler stubbornly refuses your arms.
Your kindergartener clung to you on that first day of school, but now hops out of your car without so much as a backward glance.
Your teenager formerly came to you with every sorrow. Today she asks to be left alone to talk to her friends because they’re the only ones who understand her.
Our children commence their lives driven to establish secure attachments with us. Once that task is complete, they begin their work of separating from us to find their own way.
The “necessary losses” of parenthood involve our children’s deliberate, systematic process of dividing themselves from us all along the path of growing up. What feels like loss to us is really progress for them as they establish their independent selves.
But the losses of parenthood don’t stop there. Instead, a parent’s losses include the loss of our dreams for ourselves, and for our children.
We lose a bit of our dreams each time we fail to be the parent we wanted to be. It happens when we realize we forgot to pick up our child from soccer practice, or when we remember—too late—that this was our day to send snacks to school.
Before we become parents, we fantasize that we’ll be really good ones. But we can’t seem to muster much patience when our rascal spills milk for the third time in a day. We lose our dreams of ourselves as parents as we come to understand that parenting is a rugged trek that sometimes outdistances our resources.
Likewise, we lose our dreams for our children as we learn to accept them for who they really are. We may have dreamt of raising a musician only to find that our child has little apparent interest in music. We hoped to raise a child who would follow our footsteps, only to watch as he forges a path all his own.
Raising children feels like loss when we focus only on what we’re missing. But buried in each of those necessary losses is a gain, as our children discover who they were born to become, and we discover joy in letting go.