Dear Son,
Today you will wake up in your new room. For the first time since you were placed into my arms eighteen years ago, it is not down the hall from my bedroom. It is not even in the same state.
I remember the first time that I told you what college was, how I explained that after graduating from high school, you would go off to another school where you would live on-campus in a dorm full of other young people. You looked at me, your brown eyes wide with wonder, and said, “Do some people stay at home and go to college close by?” My words have come back to haunt me: “Yes, son, but you won’t be doing that.”
Next month will be seventeen years since I dropped you off at your first day of preschool, seventeen years since the teacher pried you out of my arms as you cried, seventeen years since I went to the parking lot, sat in my car, and cried. Two days later, when it was your father’s turn to drop you off, he did the same.
The three half days that you spent in the one-year-old classroom in the parents’ morning out program each week were meant to honor something that I recognized in you: you needed your own space. Even as a baby, you were fiercely independent. You needed your own world, a place outside our watchful eye where you could explore, make friends, and become your own person. You still need that.
This is the moment that we have tried to prepare you for. It is the whole point of parenting: to raise you to become your own self, to take authority over your own life. But it is not an easy thing to love someone well enough to let them go.
It is the whole point of parenting: to raise you to become your own self, to take authority over your own life. But it is not an easy thing to love someone well enough to let them go.
I worry about where we might have failed you, where we may not have prepared you for the challenges you will face. I think about what we might have done differently if we had known that time would pass so quickly, that this day would arrive so soon. Maybe your dad should have played catch with you more. Maybe I should have taken you with me when I went to conferences. Maybe we should have gone on more bike rides, played more games, participated in more protests. Maybe we should have kept you in church even when it hurt us.
My heart races with fear of you being 500 miles out of reach, my mind with a list of lessons that I pray we have imparted well enough. Ultimately, I know that I must trust us: our parenting, your capability, our love.
Still, I wish I could list all lessons here. But I will leave you with just a few.
Life is one giant obstacle course. You will face challenges. People will disappoint you. You may disappoint yourself. You’ll make mistakes, get your heart broken, fail at something that mattered to you. You will be hurt. You will hurt someone. Get up laughing when life knocks you down. Trust your capability (you have survival skills that you don’t even realize). If at first you don’t succeed, try a few more times, because sometimes the success is in the effort.
Enjoy the journey. Relish the good moments and learn from the bad. Learn to forgive and to apologize. Respect other people’s boundaries and have good ones for yourself. Let the right people in. Honor your intuition when it tells you that someone isn’t trustworthy. Find your people and nurture your relationships. Keep making people laugh. Go to the gym. Try to eat something that grew from the earth everyday. Keep hydrated and mind the business that is yours. Stay focused on your studies but also have fun. Take risks and make good decisions.
Remember: you are loved more deeply than you could ever imagine. Your family is always on standby, ready to show up and show out for you at any moment.
For eighteen years our lives have been completely intertwined. Now we both get to grow up. It is going to be hard, at least it will be for me. But I will be okay, just as I was when I dropped you off for the first day of preschool, then elementary, middle, and high school. And like I did each for each of those milestones, first I’m going to sit in my car and cry for a while.
Love,
Your mom
TALK BACK: What has been the hardest—and most beautiful—part of learning to let someone you love grow into their own person?
Every now and then I read a book or listen to an album that I want to tell the world about. Maybe I can’t tell the world but I can at least tell those of you who read my newsletter.
My two recommendations include a book and an album: Amena Brown’s Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl and Propaganda’s This Is Our Fellowship. These feel like two conversations happening in two different rooms in the same house.
In Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl, the women are sitting in the den, talking about all the rules we thought we had to follow, only to realize that they didn’t serve us at all. We’re reminiscing about the days when Grandmama used to set up shop in the kitchen. We’d all wait our turn across the threshold in the den as she called us one by one to get our hair straightened for Easter Sunday. Bearing the same name as my favorite poem by Brown, Never Tell a Black Girl is a love letter to Black women who have, as Lucille Clifton would say, cobbled selves together out of starshine and clay. I’m listening to the audiobook version, which is both lovely (because I get to hear my friend Amena’s voice) and weird (because I was part of the Black Girl Studio audience for the poetry sections of the audiobook recording and I can hear my laughter). Get the book and subscribe to Amena’s Substack, Black Girl Is a Verb.
I never know what to call Propaganda. A rapper? A Christian rapper? A spoken word artist? A prophet? Listening to his latest album, This Is Our Fellowship, is like eavesdropping on the conversation that the men are having on the back porch when the game is in halftime and shit just got real. It is political and emotional and spiritual and…whew. I think my favorite songs are “Gas You Up” and “I Didn’t Leave You.” I’ve had the whole album on repeat for weeks now. Do yourself a favor and take a listen.
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