Parenting

Launch

This morning, I woke to this: the remaining monarch chrysalis that my daughter brought home for the weekend from her job at the children’s section of the local library. When she brought the habitat home, it contained two chrysalises, each named after a planet in keeping with the summer reading theme of “a universe of stories.” Mars emerged yesterday; Neptune emerged this morning.

Neptune’s hatch has special significance, because today is also this daughter’s first day of college. It is a local college that she will be attending for her first two years, so she is still at home. But it nevertheless marks a major transformation. She’s been homeschooled since first grade. Now she, like Neptune, is launching.

I feel it. I am still homeschooling Younger Daughter, so the journey is not over. And I resumed teaching at a community college last year, so transitions of all kinds are going on, even as we hold on to the homeschooling pattern that has shaped our lives for so many years now. These are good days that hold their share of adventure.

Yet I felt the bittersweet, too, as I hung this week’s single homeschool schedule on the fridge last night. For years, there have been two of them; now there’s one. And though we remain in the same household, there is that tug of awareness that this doesn’t last forever. Both daughters will launch, completely, as they are supposed to do. Even as I look forward toward this, I catch myself looking back, too. We started homeschooling because we had educational dreams, yet when all is said and done I find it’s the relationships that I value most of all — relationships that have grown rich and deep in the soil of many hours together. It has been the greatest of gifts. I couldn’t help recognizing that this morning marks an ending of something even as it begins something else.

Those relationships will last, even though there will be more transformations and launchings to come. I remembered this and took heart this morning as Older Daughter headed off to a new world, fully prepared to test her wings and meet every challenge, ready to emerge into wider and wider worlds. It’s a beautiful thing to watch, and to anticipate for Younger Daughter in a few more years. Every bit as beautiful as Neptune.

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