Owning Your Own S%$#

One of the hardest things I find as a parent is letting my only child learn to take care of herself. As a mostly non-working mother of one child I have some guilt about not doing things like cooking dinner or doing laundry since I feel like that should come before doing needlepoint or playing Mah Jongg. I don’t have any guilt about not making dinner because I am trying to get my steps –what is torturing me should not also add guilt to my life, but what is giving me pleasure is allowed to.

I don’t know why I have this guilt. I grew up with a mother who trained me to get up, make my own breakfast, pack my school lunch, make her coffee and bring it to her in bed before I went to the school bus, and that was in elementary school. Guilt was not a mother’s job back in the sixties, unless you had a mother who was making you feel guilty.

About the time that Carter got her driver’s license and started getting herself to school and off to work at her barn I noticed I was getting better at letting her figure out her own stuff. What was she going to have for lunch? Who knows, she can figure it out. Does she have money? I guess if she needed money she would ask. Does she have diesel in her car? Finding a gas station that sells diesel is what Siri is for.

Today I really feel like I turned a corner of letting go as Carter was turning a corner of owning her own S$%#. Russ and I were going to Raleigh to have dinner with one of his work friends. Carter had made an appointment with someone she wanted to see to help her with something. She did not run it by me if she should do that, she just did it herself. I told her we were going to be out and she needed to figure everything out. She did. We got home and all was good in the world. I had no guilt about not doing the mother thing, she laid no guilt that I was not helping, but was happy to own her future.

I know that the process of growing up is not a straight line upwards, but it is a great feeling when I can see progress that has nothing to do with me. It makes me a little sad to think the day is coming fast when she won’t be here to ask me to help, but seeing how much she can handle on her own is what I have been working towards all these years. Now if I can just get her to bring me my iced tea in bed before she leaves for school.