The Deal
/I once saw a cartoon where the first frame showed a mother and teacher talking. The teacher is explaining how tears are to be expected on the first day of school. The second frame showed the student walking into school as her father, on his knees clinging to his child, is bawling. It was a cartoon shared with me after we sent our son off to kindergarten and I behaved much like the father in the cartoon. Today, we took our youngest to college, and I was surprised to have all those feelings again.
Such moments bring thoughts about the past, present and future together like atoms colliding into an emotional nuclear explosion.
· I thought about the day we brought her home from the hospital, the way she and I would play in the car as we waited for the preschool doors to open, nights cuddled on the couch watching Disney movies, watching her on stage in many theater productions, her delivering a sermon in eighth grade, and her many accomplishments in the classroom and on the soccer field and tennis court.
· She’s made it to this moment and wants to be a teacher. She has the heart for such a vocation, which is the one thing that can’t be taught, and now has found a place where she can learn the tools she’ll need. Her present is ripe.
· But as exciting as her future may be, the fact is she will never live at home full time again. College vacations will usurp family ones, and, yes, there will be a boy in her future who will matter more to her than her father.
Boom!
The thoughts and emotions collided as I drove to the campus. Like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, I was lost in the sunrises and sunsets of our life together. Like Steven Curtis Chapman, I longed to dance with Cinderella, holding her tight and never letting her go.
Then, it was time to leave . . .
The pain is stirring within me as I write, and I’m reminded of a poignant scene in Shaddowlands when Joy Gresham, the wife of C. S. Lewis who is dying of cancer, looks at her husband after a wonderful walk in the countryside and reminds him that the pain to come is part of the present joy. The two are intertwined like threads and, as hard as we might like to separate them, there’s never one without the other. “That’s the deal,” she says.
Dropping a child off at school, whether at kindergarten or college, is such a moment. There are many others. The joy of such moments is made more pronounced when placed beside the sadness. For a long time, I tried to have one without the other, but it’s impossible. So, holding in my grateful hand all that we’ve had, and celebrating all she’s become, I walked away and offered her to the one I trust with such things, praying I might make it to the car without bawling.
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