I wrote a post about sending our first kid off to college last time.

If you haven’t read it yet, I’ll summarize it for you:

Whiny, whiny, boo-hoo, cry, send our kid away… boring, boring.

But this is the thing that really bothers me, as I think about it a bit more.

It’s not really fair that just when our kids become helpful we send them away.

I mean think about it for a minute. Kids come out of the womb as little Machiavellis. I can give an example from my own life. Before one of my kids could speak she was bossing me around.

“How?” you ask.

We had taught her sign language and she knew about four words. She knew how to say “I love you” and she knew how to say “Milk”. We were teaching her to ask for what she needed. This is good. But we didn’t expect a little tyrant to emerge.

For example, when I walked into her room in the morning she didn’t gaze up at me with loving, thankful eyes and ask for some milk with a smile.

Her face screwed into a scowl, she was standing and angrily clenching both fists, glaring at us, and non-verbally (effectively) yelling the sign for milk.

“WHERE is the hired help?!” her nonverbal cues were sending us. Clearly, we weren’t measuring up to her expectations. And we were only two months in on this parenting journey. (OK maybe it took her longer than two months to become a tyrant but not much more than that.)

And compare that to now. I mean homeschooling teenagers can cook! And they know how to do the dishes!

Why would we get rid of them now?

I think parents should form a union.

We should demand that homeschooled teenagers stay with us forever. They should be massaging our feet and feeding us grey poupon (Do you swallow that stuff whole?) after all the blood, sweat, and tears we poured into them.

If people do need to change and mature over time, then I think that after we’ve had our homeschooled, helpful kids and teens for a long time, then sure, they can change back into babies.

Then we can send them away because we’re losing the unhelpful babies and not the helpful teens.

Wait. What’s that you say? God already designed the universe that way?

Ah!!! I guess you are right!

When God gave teenagers parents, he designed the parents to do just that. Parents are helpful to their teens, and then the parents are the ones that mature into essentially incoherent, helpless babies again.

Ah!!! 

I didn’t think of that!

Maybe it’s all about perspective!? I’m alive today!

This is a good day!

I don’t mind that my helpful, kind, sweet daughter went off to university!

The way the universe works is just fine, come to think of it!

Go away!

If I’m not poised halfway between land and sky, about ready for them to shovel earth on top of me, then this is a great day!

It’s amazing that being grateful that we’re alive is a balm to so many of our problems!

I think I’ll see if my husband wants to learn English country dancing with me now that my daughter has left for university.

We have some extra time.

What a perfect world we live in!

(. . . But if distraction isn’t a perfect solution for you either . . .

As you try desperately to hang onto the rope as you swing through the seasons of life, you could cling to God by praying through the lyrics of this song: “I’m here traveling down this long and winding road. Seasons come, seasons go . . . But I’m still standing on the only rock I know.”)