The college drop off
I just dropped my daughter off at college.
Not for orientation. For real this time. She had her first practice today as a D1 diver at the University of Kentucky, and afterward I took her to dinner and drove her back to her new home. When I pulled up to her apartment we were laughing about the chickens that live on the corner, joking that she should train them to come say hi. I used the drive to tell her how proud I am. How much she earned this. How I'll always be here, call me anytime.
I said I was going to cry. She laughed. We took one picture, had to retake it because of the double chin, laughed about that too. And then I just started crying, told her I loved her, hugged her, and drove away thinking the whole way home that I wish I had gotten out of the car and held her one more time.
Diving has been my life too, the travel, the meets, years of being in that world with her. And now that chapter is hers to carry.
I've been crying since last Monday.
Here's what I keep thinking about. She was in second grade, swimming because her sister was swimming, and I kept putting off signing her up for diving. She asked me every week. I kept saying next week. And then one day she got out of the pool at practice, walked over, and threw all her gear on the ground right next to me. She said: sign me up for dive now, I'm never coming back.
I knew she meant it. I signed her up for dive that week.
As it was November, the coach told me if she made it through the winter, I'd have a diver. She made it through the winter. She wanted to train more, I said no, she pushed, I held my position. I remember her asking me, if I qualify for nationals, can I go? I said yes having no idea what that meant. She qualified for nationals in the 1-meter, we went to Georgia for the competition, and that was it. She never stopped. Over the years I learned to get out of the way and let her pursue the thing, and at some point I even felt guilty for the resistance I'd put up early on. The odds of a child becoming an NCAA Division 1 athlete are under 6%. She was 11 years old, how was I to know.
Through the years this kid has taught me discipline. She watches what she eats, when she sleeps, how she thinks. She is hard on herself and hard on all of us, she makes us better, and we make her better, and now she is off on the next chapter of her story. She holds goals and makes every decision in honor of that goal.
I am sad. Fully, genuinely, sitting-in-a-100-year-old-home-in-Kentucky sad. And I am letting myself feel all of it.
But I noticed something on the drive away. I am sad and I am not scared. And I know the difference, because I have been scared before. When my marriage ended, I thought I had nothing. I could not see what was on the other side. That was fear, and it was loud, and it sat on my chest for a long time. This is not that. This is grief with a clean conscience. I did the work. I raised that kid through everything, and she threw her gear on the ground in second grade and told me exactly who she was, and I listened, and here we are.
The fear of freedom. Because when the kids don't need you the same way anymore, you can't say I can't, I'm busy anymore. There's really no reason now. And for women at this stage, that is its own kind of terrifying. Not because the future looks bad. Because it's wide open, and wide open is a lot to hold.
What I know, after living through the transition I never thought I'd survive, is that the fear of freedom and the fear of failure feel almost identical in your chest. They are not the same thing. One means something is ending. The other means you are standing at the edge of something entirely yours.
I am not scared. I am sad, and I am strong, and I am so overjoyed at what we built together, that kid and me, side by side, doing the next great thing. This is the thing I see in woman I work with, whether she's signing divorce papers or starting a business chapter or, like me right now, watching a kid walk into her own life. The transition itself isn't the hard part. It's standing in the gap before you know what's on the other side, and mistaking that gap for danger when it's actually just empty space waiting to be filled with something true.
She never stopped. I don't plan to either.
Becky
