Something Left Behind

The drive to her college took two days, fourteen hours of highway, three of us in the car, no particular hurry to get there.

It gave us time to just be a family. We stopped for lunch and dinner, took turns on the playlist, talked about the past and about what was coming. When "Party in the USA" came on, all three of us sang. It's become our family anthem. It's been on every car ride we've taken and every trip through Europe. "You were only two or three when this came out," I told my daughter, "and it's still one of your favorite songs."

I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the little girl on her way to camp. I looked again and saw the eighteen-year-old looking back at me. Both of them were in there, and I didn't get to choose.

Three of us were driving. Only two of us would drive back.

My son, my daughter's twin, stayed home with the dogs. He leaves for college himself later this month.

Move-in was bins and boxes and a hallway full of families doing the same thing at the same time. We stayed until there was nothing left to carry up.

"Instead of dragging goodbyes out, let's just say goodbye after we're done moving in."

That was her request, and we understood it. No text from the road, no call from the hotel, no FaceTime from a gas station somewhere. It felt final. It also made sense. She wanted to go back up to her room, be with her new roommates, and go to dinner with them. She wanted to start her life there instead of spending the evening finishing ours. So we hugged her, turned around, and walked to the car.

Then the hotel. Then the long way home.

September always feels like this, endings and beginnings stacked on top of each other. The end of summer, the start of school, the last of the carefree days and the first of the new responsibilities. Your body knows before your mind does. I've felt it every year of my life. I had just never felt it in a car with an empty seat in it.

We didn't only leave our daughter behind. We left behind a version of our family that doesn't exist anymore.

Nothing catastrophic happened. Everything happened exactly as it was supposed to. And something still ended.

You Don't Need to Be Ready

"Maybe I should take a gap year."

"What if I worked this year and took classes at community college instead?"

Every family I know has some version of this conversation in the last weeks of August. We had ours. We took each question seriously and followed it all the way to the end. What the year would actually look like, what she'd be doing in March, where she'd be the following September.

What we kept coming back to was a distinction. A gap year you take because there's something you're burning to go do is one thing. A gap year you take because the other option frightens you is just the same fear with a year added to it.

So the answer stayed the same. Go.

Fear makes us think and do crazy things. It's in our DNA, and it believes it's helping. It wants us safe, comfortable, and still. So it tells us we're not ready. That we don't have the skills. That everyone else is better prepared and smarter than we are.

And you know what? Sometimes that's true. Sometimes everyone else really is more prepared than you.

You go anyway. You go scared.

That was our message, over and over. You will rise to it. Not because you're ready, but because rising is what happens after you go.

All the big things arrive before we're ready. Marriage, kids, the job, college. You can prepare and study and plan and do everything to get set, but at some point the preparation runs out and the only thing left is the leap.

In my book A Field Guide to Creativity, I write about the frog who wants a bigger pond. There's no bridge to it. There's the leap, and there's the lily pad. From where the frog is sitting, there's no way to know whether that pad will hold him, or whether it's even there.

In my experience, it usually is. Not because the universe owes anyone a soft landing, but because the leap itself changes what's available to you. You can't see the next pad until you're already in the air.

She got in the car. She carried the boxes up. She went anyway.

You don't need to be ready.
You need to go.

And if you're scared, YOU DO IT SCARED.

Who Am I If I'm No Longer Needed

This feeling isn't new to me. I didn't wake up on college move-in day and suddenly discover I was no longer needed. That had already happened years earlier, and it was devastating.

It happened on Halloween, which is normally my favorite time of the year.

Every year since the twins were born we went out together. The first year we dressed them as lions and took them to a few select houses in the neighborhood, since it was cold and rainy. My love of the season seeped into them fast. Every September we'd start in earnest on costumes. They picked the theme, and then I'd sketch and revise and research. I built Pinterest boards. I found cloth samples and props. We made the costumes together, and I could not have been happier.

The ritual lasted from kindergarten through ninth grade.

I knew it was ending. There's that awkward stretch where teenagers get too self-conscious, too aware that they aren't kids anymore and maybe shouldn't be excited about this. Mine lasted longer than most, probably because I'm a big kid myself and my enthusiasm buoyed theirs. I was lucky to get as long as I did.

Tenth grade was the first year without it. The sadness started in September. I could feel it coming on like a receding beach before a tidal wave.

By then my son was putting together his own costume. Teen appropriate. Some effort, but not so much that it would seem cringe. He was going to a party with friends instead of coming with us or going to a family get-together.

I sat on the couch watching Young Frankenstein, waiting for trick-or-treaters. My son, who is very empathetic, sat down next to me before he headed out.

"What's wrong, dad?"

I told him. I said I felt an overwhelming sense of loss, that his and his sister's childhood was over, and that the specific father-and-child thing the three of us had was ending. I told him I missed walking the neighborhood with them, the leaves coming down, the cold air, the whole street alive with kids and laughing. I also told him I was happy for him, glad he had a new life of teenage experiences ahead, and that having a life on his own terms mattered.

He said he understood, and that he felt some of it too. He could tell things were changing, and leaving childhood things behind was hard. We hugged. He left for his party. I watched my movie and handed out candy to a very meager crowd of trick-or-treaters.

It was going to be okay.

Around ten o'clock, my son came home.

I asked why he was back so early and how the party was. He sat back down next to me. The party was fine, he said. The people were nice, his friends were good, nobody was really dressed up, they talked and had snacks. All perfectly appropriate, adult things to do at a party.

It just had none of the fun.

So we sat there and talked about what Halloween used to be. Being a kid with his friends, playing in someone's backyard in costume. How I'd BBQ huge plates of hot dogs and sausages and let them ravage the food and eat however boys want to eat. All the dads over with their sons, everybody sweaty from the trampoline, then out into the neighborhood like little heathens, house to house, running into classmates and their little brothers and sisters in the street.

I told him Halloween would stay fun, and that some of the best ones were still ahead of him, in college and in his twenties in some city.

I don't know if he believed me. I'm not sure I did either.

We sat there a while longer and watched black and white horror movies from the fifties. It was really nice.

That was the night I stopped being the dad I had been. Somewhere between October 31st and November 1st, I became a different kind of father.

Before that, I knew exactly what kind of father I wanted to be. And I was him. I did it the way I believed it was supposed to be done.

I have no clue what this new one is. I'm making it up as I go.

But I'm living by example now. Taking risks, and picking up the pieces after a failure where my kids can watch me do it.

Your children aren't the only ones being asked to become somebody new.

I'm still needed. I'm just being asked to become someone new, too.