It happened the day I dropped my son off at college. I had just left his dorm and pulled my truck into a gas station to fill up the tank before starting out on the 200 plus mile drive back to Hampton, Georgia.  I opened the door to get out and as soon as my left foot stepped onto the running board, I felt my heart being ripped out of my chest.

I had not cried at all the week leading up to the drop off. I didn’t shed a tear on the trip down to Valdosta, nor during lunch before Najee and I made our way on campus. I did not cry as I unpacked the kitchen and bathroom supplies for his dorm room. When I gave Najee a hug outside of the dorm after deciding that I had reached the balance I had intended (not leaving him at the curb with all of his stuff and not staying long enough to scrub out all of the kitchen and bathroom cabinets as I so desperately wanted), I did not shed a single tear. But that first step out of my truck knowing that I would be leaving my son in a matter of minutes broke me in half: I cried the first 100 miles of the return trip; stopping at the half way point between Najee’s school and home.

Once I was on the interstate, I decided to cry as much as I needed, for as long as I needed. I used the hand towel I’d brought to defend myself against the mid-August, South Georgia heat to catch my tears. The tears were accompanied by crazy, outrageous thoughts that, miraculously, opened my mind and heart to the three elements of love.

The thoughts clawed their way up and out of my subconscious from the oldest part of the human brain that scientists (and Martha Beck) often refer to as the reptilian or reactive brain. My reptilian brain is a decidedly dark, wretched place. My most horrible, ridiculous fears live there. When my rational brain is not at the top of its game, creepy, terrifying thoughts climb-up to the surface, kick open the door to my reality then finger paint images of fear all over it. As I merged onto the interstate, my reactive mind berated me for dropping my son off on a deserted island to fend for himself. Did I mention that in my reptilian brain Najee was three and not eighteen? I honestly felt I was abandoning him.

I can’t recall how long this train of thought continued, but I do remember my conscious mind challenging the bizarre fantasy my reactive brain was steadily constructing. The vision of  my small child alone on an island hunting his own food and fighting alligators simply wasn’t true. It was a lie. My rational brain told me the truth: I had taken my son as far as I could take him; college represented the bridge from childhood to adulthood and I couldn’t go on that journey with him. The truth was that our love was not ending, just changing. When I opened my heart to this truth, the first element of love came to me.

Love is trust. It is tested, challenged; even battered trust. I realized that I could not profess to love my son if I did not trust him and trust myself. I had to trust how I had raised him, and the foundation I gave him to be a productive contributor to society. I had to trust that Najee would remember his morals, his sense of integrity, and his humanity. I had to trust that he would carry himself like the Southern gentleman he had been raised to be. After all, there would have been no reason to put in the work and time I had over the last eighteen years if I didn’t trust the outcomes. If I didn’t trust Najee to be the man I raised him to be my efforts were a waste of time and had nothing to do with love.

These new thoughts slowed my tears and halted the threat of hyperventilation. But, my reactive brain struck again as my breathing normalized. The next thought that flashed across the screen in my head was: He doesn’t need me anymore. That turned out to be an enormous lie. The day after I took him to college, Najee and I spent hours on the phone.  I helped him buy books, complete financial aid paperwork, and find his mailbox number so I could send him the bath towels he’d left at home. And then there was the check that I wrote for the balance of his tuition the following week. So, I can state emphatically that my son does indeed still need me. But as the miles towards home sped by the, “he doesn’t need me” lie danced around my head and called up the tears—actually sobs—once again. Luckily, my conscious mind had not retreated. It came out of its solitary corner, smiling softly and offering quiet, none dramatic relief: My son and I are in transition. We are moving out of the traditional parent-child stage of our relationship into the adult-friendship phase. My role now is to provide guidance. That doesn’t mean fix everything or come up with all the answers. It does mean being available and asking the questions that may not have occurred to Najee so that he can get to the answers on his own. While Najee was growing up, I was the caretaker of his life. Now my job is to stand in the background while he learns to manage his own life. I was not prepared for how difficult the transition would be. Click here to read Part 2.

-Melissa Brown Levine
www.melissabrownlevine.com

After eighteen years of taking care of every aspect of my child’s life, the act of handing over the reins resulted in the heart ache I experienced at the gas station in Valdosta. My mind had always known this time would come, but my heart had been pretending to be tough and ready to be out of the full-time parenting business. Real love hurts sometimes. And as my rational brain reminded me: Children leave home and parents are left behind. It is a natural part of life. The second element of love, acceptance, is the key to surviving that transition.

My eyes began to dry as I neared the rest stop where I would take my only break. I didn’t want to scare anyone, so I made the effort to pull myself together before taking the ramp and exiting my truck. Fortunately, my conscious mind offered more real talk: You can’t control what happens to Najee now. You simply have to accept what comes. Now, I’ve only just learned how to do acceptance over the last three years. And I’ll admit that I mostly suck at it. But I decided to challenge myself in this area. If I could learn to live as a single woman, content with my life then surely I could learn to accept that my son is in college, and I don’t get to baby him anymore. I expect to cross the line and be pushed back into my new place with an exasperated, “I got this,” from Najee, but I‘m pretty adept at self -monitoring, so I think I’ll be able to manage myself okay.

At the rest stop, I splashed water on my face and took several deep breaths. When I got back in the truck, there was an uplifting text message on my phone from a friend who had asked me if I was okay before I left Valdosta. I’d responded with a panicked declaration of my complete aloneness. After being married and divorced twice and raising Najee alone for several years, for the first time in my adult life, I was literally on my own. It was pretty scary to accept that. What was I supposed to do with my maternal instinct now? It had only stopped hounding me for another child during Najee’s last year of high school as all of the stress and the money and the expectations and the money (did I say that already) built up. After Najee’s senior year broke me, I began to look forward to having an empty nest. But the reality of it made me wonder what I would do with myself (even though I have a full-time job, continuous freelance work, and a series of novels, a stage play and a screen play to write). The thing is, I had started missing Najee weeks before I took him to school just as I always did before he would go away for the summer to visit his father. I hadn’t given myself permission to surrender to the sadness, so it all came out on my drive home.

I think surrender is the most difficult element of love. No one likes to. You can feel weak and small when you do it. But when you let go, when you surrender your defenses and your ego, we can experience the awesome power of love: all of its beauty and strength. Yes, it hurts to let go, but only because our muscles are cramped from holding up our flimsy defenses for so long. Once we put them down, yeah it will hurt, but the pain will eventually subside.

I surrendered to the pain of leaving Najee all of three and a half hours away from home as I reached Macon, just forty-five minutes from Hampton. When I surrendered to my anguish, I found relief. Fighting our emotions contributes to the pain we experience during life transitions like the emptying of the nest. When I stopped fighting, my tears stopped flowing. By the time I pulled into my driveway, I was calm and tired, but at ease.

The crying didn’t end that day, but my subsequent episodes were not over-the-top dramatizations of losing or abandoning my son. My tears were simply a short response to missing my child. Najee was doing what he was supposed to be doing with his life. Ironically, the morning after my Valdosta to Hampton journey I learned that one of my essays was accepted for publication. It served as a reminded that while Najee was making a major life adjustment in college, I was also doing what I was supposed to be doing with my own life. And as long as I continue to trust, accept, and surrender to our love, we will both be just fine.

-Melissa Brown Levine
www.melissabrownlevine.com

Lately I seem to be surrounded by women who are in the middle of major life changes involving children. They are in their forties, as I am, and are either starting their families, or, like me, managing their newly emptied nests. In the midst of major change, these women—all of us—are trying our best to be in total control of everything that comes with these life transformations. We are “fix-it” women: we believe that we have the power to control and alter every aspect of our lives and those of the people we love. We believe it, that is, until we hit a wall and realize that we actually can’t fix everything. This epiphany can lead to depression, anger and resentment. But I have discovered a solution to this problem. It is not an easy solution and it may take several attempts at mastering the steps before it sticks, but it does offer a release. The answer to the problem is to surrender.

Okay, I know…you think surrender means being a doormat. It doesn’t. It actually takes quite a bit of strength and courage to admit that you are not all powerful and cannot control every aspect of everyone’s life. Not even your own. More often than we like to admit, we have to let go and allow life to work itself out. It sucks, but the alternative is actively resisting change that may simply need to occur, which may result in emotional and physical anguish.

I’m in the process of practicing surrender as I write this post. My eighteen-year-old son has made some decisions that have resulted in unnecessary obstacles being placed on the once pristinely clear path that is his young life. The more I learned about the consequences he is facing as a result of his decisions, the more I suffered with my “fix-it” addiction. The reality is that I have very few tools in my parenting toolbox as a mother of an adult child. I hate that, but it is my reality now. I have to surrender to it. So, after my mid-week cry which led to a head splitting migraine, I worked my way through the following steps of letting go:

Look at the Issue Realistically 
We (meaning those of the “fix-it” clan) have a tendency to exaggerate problems or issues that we cannot control. My first step was to stop looking at the challenges my son is facing as impossible for him to overcome. They are not. The problems may be unnecessary. They were definitely avoidable. But they are not impossible. Taking one giant step out of the hysteria box helped me find the trail that would eventually lead me to calm.

Accept What You Cannot Change  
This is where you have to defy your “fix-it” nature. My son did not take his first semester in college seriously and as a result his grades are in the toilet. He kept his downward spiral to himself, even when I checked in with him regularly and asked how he was managing his classes. I did my part and still felt guilty when the truth finally came out (My big toe got caught on the corner of the hysteria box). But the fact of the matter is that there is nothing I could have done for my son beyond providing the support I offered readily. That’s why kids go to college: To learn how to manage their lives. Not for their mothers to stand over them every night making sure the homework is complete and that they actually studied for the math test coming up on Monday. Part of my journey to surrender was to accept that I have no power to change the decisions that my son made—or will make in the future.

Embrace What You Can Control. Set Your Boundaries. Breathe.  
Once I acknowledged what I could control in this situation (which boiled down to how long I let myself cry and how soon I got up to retrieve the Excedrin® Migraine) I also embraced the fact that, even though I can’t ground him anymore, I can set limits of what I am willing to do for him now that he is making adult decisions. I did that in a two page letter that I sent to him over the weekend. I discovered that making the concrete statement, “You cannot live in my house unless you are in school full-time or working full-time and paying rent,” made me feel less out of control. It made me feel less helpless. And it set a standard: We are both adults and we must now deal with each other in that manner. After I pressed “send” on the email…I just let myself breathe.  It’s hard to cling to old beliefs when you allow yourself to breathe in your new reality.

Flow With It  
After you have taken an honest assessment of the issue, accepted what you cannot control, and identified clear boundaries that you can safely work with all while breathing…surrender settles in. And you must ride it out. It’s not that resistance (i.e. the “fix-it” twitch) won’t rise up in your chest again. It will. But you get to choose whether to pursue resistance or take as many steps away from driving yourself crazy as are necessary.

Repeat.  
I did say that this process wasn’t easy.

Expect to cycle through these steps several times (I already have in just the last few days) until you adjust to the weight and texture of surrender against your skin. The sense of dread will pass—eventually. The fear will transform into a solid respect for the untamable power of the universe. And the peace you gain from finally being able to let something go will make you a better person and hopefully allow the focus of your “fix-it” addiction to work towards finding his or her own way.

-Melissa Brown Levine
www.melissabrownlevine.com

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