I woke up this morning thinking about Halloween. About pulling the boxes down from the garage shelves, skeletons and the fake cobwebs, the little routine we’ve done for years without once thinking of it as something we’d run out of. And then it hit me, suddenly and solidly: this is the last Halloween my daughter will spend at home.
She’s a senior now. Applying to colleges. Moving out of state, most likely. And ever since that became real, every ordinary thing carries a little more weight. It wasn’t so long ago that I was living entirely inside her firsts. First steps. First day of school. First lost tooth, first everything. When she was little, time felt endless, more than we could ever use. And now here I am, wondering where it all went.
None of us can talk about her leaving without getting emotional. Her dad has started thinking about that first Monday — the ordinary one, the one where he’ll get up and she simply won’t be down the hall. Her brother can’t get through a sentence about it. He has never known a single day of his life without her in it. I think about her empty room. About not getting to hug her every day. About missing her laugh, and the specific way she bursts through the door already mid-story, like the world is too good to keep to herself.
And still. Underneath all of it, her leaving is a symbol that we did something right. That’s the part I keep having to remind myself of when the ache gets too big. We are not losing her. We finished something with her. I am so proud of her I can hardly hold it. I hope she finds every single bit of the happiness she’s looking for.
So maybe this year isn’t about trying to stop time. Maybe this year is about the opposite. About spending as much of it truly present as I possibly can. Listening more than I talk. Enjoying her instead of managing her. Holding space for her. And letting myself feel the whole thing — the sadness and the joy, the love and the excitement, the contentment, the purpose. All of it at the same time.
Because I think I’ve been looking at this backward.
My lasts are becoming her firsts.
Her first home away from home. Her first morning waking up inside a life that is entirely her own. Her first real discoveries about who she is when there’s no one there to hand her the answer — when she goes out into the world to find her own way and finds out she can “do it the self” like she used to say when she was little. Every last I’m grieving is a door I get to watch her walk through as a first. I’ve just been standing on my side of it, counting what’s ending, when she’s on her side counting everything about to begin.
And maybe that’s the actual assignment of this part of being a parent. To remember everything that brought us here — every first that made every last possible. To be genuinely, unreasonably proud of who she turned out to be. To trust that she’s ready. And then, somehow, the harder half: to become ready ourselves.
So I’ll let myself be sad. I’m not going to perform being fine, because performing fine has never once made me actually feel fine, and my daughter has spent seventeen years watching how I do hard things. Let this be one more. But I’ll also hold the other truth right next to the sadness, the two of them side by side, both true: we raised a smart, confident, independent young woman who is ready to go.
The lasts were never the ending. They were the proof of a beautiful and purposeful time together.
With much love and great gratitude,
Tayne
Ah, sweet and sassy Hilton! I can't believe how fast time has gone by. It seems only yesterday that she was in preschool.