Our daughter, King #2 is two weeks away from leaving for college. She will be attending school in Dallas, and she’s the first of our kids to flee the 806. If you try to console me by saying, “it’s only a five-hour drive or a forty-five-minute flight,” I will invite you to come over and measure the distance between her bedroom door and mine. Dallas isn’t the dinner table. Dallas isn’t the sofa where we huddle together watching old TV shows on a phone screen when the men of our house have highjacked the big screen. Dallas isn’t the garage where she offers to let me drive her car, but I can’t quite squeeze myself through the seven-inch gap she leaves between the car door and the wall.
It’s been over eighteen years since I have been the only girl in the house, and while we have been outvoted on movie night for most of those years, we are mighty force, impossible to ignore. Without her, I have a smelly future of boy laundry and Die Hard ahead of me. Your prayers are appreciated.
What concerns me most about leaving her in the Big D is that she’ll be all alone. Sure, she’ll have friends in her dorm, and we have family nearby, but she will have to learn to merge like her life depends on it on the LBJ Freeway and I-20. Who will come to her aid if that goes poorly? She will have to plan her own food procurement, whether that be from the meal plan we bought or whatever snacks will fit into her half of the dorm mini fridge. She won’t be able to text me, “what’s for dinner?” like her older brother still sometimes does. She will have to learn to be an adult without the safety net we have provided for eighteen years. I know she can do hard things for and by herself. She’s strong and capable. But she’s also my kid, and watching each of them grow up and put me out a job is tough.
The next toughest part is the emotional tug of war where one minute I hope she never leaves and the next, I’m ready to pack up the car now. Comedian Leann Morgan says God knows right before daughters leave home, moms are grieving, so He “makes girls just as mean as He can so that you can let them go.” I’m indeed grieving, and as for the other part, she’s slightly terrifying lately, so no one let her read a copy of this.
There’s joy in the moving on as well as grief. God keeps reminding me He will protect her and provide for her better than I ever could, and He loves her more than is humanly possible. He has made her wonderfully and prepared her for the journey she’s about to take. I pray He also returns her to us with gratitude for all we’ve done for her and maybe a little sweeter knowing we sent her into the world with the Lord’s blessing.