Parenting and Letting Go: The Great Balancing Act
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My son recently had one of those 24-hour stomach bugs. Yeah. Literally, gut-wrenching. He is living with us this month, so guess what word I heard, whined in the most unattractive fashion, almost constantly? Yep. It was the word I’d so longed to hear when he was a baby: Mommy! Trouble is: my son is 29 years old now. Or – this sounds so much more incongruous – he is almost 30. Mommy, indeed. And yet, when my stomach hurts, my own mother is what I crave as well. And she has been gone since 1994.
So, the question is: when do we let go of parenting? My daughter, 26, is now a married woman and yet her desire to be “mommied” is still very real, as is my desire to be there for her. We’re doing pretty well. My husband and I keep reminding ourselves, “It’s their life.” Oh, unless their decisions affect a commitment they made to us. There’s that. Ah, balance.
Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving, makes this distinction between what he calls “erotic love” and “motherly love”: in the latter, the goal is separation. He says, “In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child’s separation.” I read this passage at least once a year, as it’s printed as “meditation” in, of all places, Reform Judaism’s High Holy Days Prayer book. Yes, indeed, to be read by overprotective Jewish mothers everywhere. Yet, each year, it serves as a milestone marker for my separation from my children. Always, I need that reminder: it is the ultimate sign of my love that I let my children go.
A little at a time. Appropriately, I always hope. Obviously, babies need to be at the center of our universe for awhile. But by age two? Their independence – or the illusion of it -is every bit as important to them. (Hence, the word “No!!!!”). And so it progresses, at each stage of childhood.
This advice is not for the parents who neglect their kids. It’s for those of us who are just a little too involved, for too long. You know who you are.
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