Enjoy every moment with your girls, Vered. We are so lucky to be blessed with children.

Kelly

When I get that call, I know I’m still mama, even to my 42-year-old daughter. She still needs me — just differently.

I’m close to my girls — even more so now that they have teenagers, that’s true. But in different ways.

What I do miss, Vered, is the snuggling, kissing away tears, playing cards, or scrabble, before school. Or reading aloud. Or building a dollhouse together. Running and jumping and painting rocks out in the yard, taking hikes and oohing and ahhing with them as they discovered exciting pieces of life. Bragging about them to my own mom — well, I still brag, but my mom has gone on.

In college, preparing to teach, I had to take child psychology courses to prepare me for the ‘inevitablilites’ of childhood. Even at the time I thought that was such a disservice to kids. When I started having babies myself and was told ‘just wait until…’ followed by the awful stages they’d go through, I dismissed that too.

If my kids went through ‘stages’ so be it. It would be their own, not something prescribed and accepted by me at face value. And my three girls all wrote their own. My youngest never went through the rebellion, don’t like mom, phase. I didn’t either, as a teen, while both my sisters did. (I was middle child, so that has nothing to do with it. Temperament does.)

Yes, Vered, you’ll cry some. But the best I can give you — as a grandma with a couple grown granddaughters and a slew of younger ones — is to embrace it all. Because it is fleeting. Our children’s childhood(s) are very short. And someday you’ll be preparing your precious beautiful child how to deal with raising her own.

Barb

Tears in my eyes for sure on this post. I can so relate! As Patricia, I’ll be probably holding on too tightly to my daughter when I should be letting go.

Kelly is so happy these days to run into school to be with her friends when I drop her off — my separate little entity in her own little world in many ways, growing up and away as she must.

In fact, one of the new songs I’ll be recording was inspired by the very thought of her growing up and away. We were driving in the car one day and I asked her something and she didn’t respond. She was in her own thoughts, as people tend to do, and not hear each other.

And I started singing, the words and melody came pretty-much together.

“She is leaving
She is leaving
She is going away.

And I am sadder
than the ocean
in the autumn
when the children
have all gone away
to classrooms
where they sit
there slowly fading.

I am sadder
than the ocean
in October
when the snow
has come too
early and too
quickly and too
deeply and too dark.”

The title is “Sadder Than The Ocean.”

Depressing eh?? It has a nice melody I think , tho.

You’ll be hitting the teen years first with yours — let me know what to expect, okay

Oh, I think kindness is so wonderful, one can never be too kind. Just have your daughter read Betsy’s and Lori’s ” A User’s Guide To Narcissism.” And your girl will be well prepared for life.

Tess, “If we didn’t have the pain we wouldn’t have the joy” – an interesting way of looking at it. Thank you for sharing your own story!

It’s a normal process you’re going through. Yes enjoy those moments. My granddaughter is 16 in April and I lost her in the last year and a half. She was a late bloomer. But this weekend we’re meeting in Chicago to have fun, it’s a different kind of fun but she shares things with me that blow my mind. She’s the best….

I dread the loss of closeness I know is coming, but am trying to just enjoy what I have with him right now.

No advice from me, as this is just part of the circle of life, but know you are not alone. They are our little people for too short a time…