Saying Goodbye . . .

Today I dropped my daughter off at the airport. She is heading back to her real life (well as real life as college dorm living ever can be) after 3 weeks of sleeping in and hanging out. Winter Break the college kids call it . . . to me it was my Alex time. It was a strange situation, as she wasn’t really “coming home.” What she considered home was back in Idaho where we lived when she packed up to head to college back in August 2009.

I welcomed her to Phoenix (new home . . . for the holidays) on December 17, 2009. Since the airport is so close to my work, her first adventure was to ride home that day in the carpool with the gals and me. We (Alex, Lester, and I) then spent the next three weeks laughing, eating her favorite foods, getting icees, celebrating Christmas, going to the Fiesta Bowl, playing Wii and board games, watching Christmas movies and taking an occasional moment to lovingly Ka-Pow! one another.

These were three weeks that went by far too fast. The minute I unloaded her bags onto the airport curb I was reminded of the weight of sadness when it lies on your heart. It was the feeling I felt in August when I drove away from her dorm building, tears engraving themselves onto my face, knowing it would be December before I would see her again. Now the feeling has embedded once again. I expect it will stay heavy for some time and then start to ease up into a dullness that I can bear until I get my next dose of Alex time. I hope the plan will remain that she will return to Phoenix for the summer.

I have only had tears off and on today and not as terribly as I did in August so I am improving. I know she is growing up and I must learn to let go as I have years of this to come . . . I just never learned to say goodbye to my daughter. I never had to . . . she was always with me, just away for a few days at most. Alex had always been the one constant in my life for 18 years; the one thing I knew was always there and made sense when the majority of my life never has.

It is her time. She is off creating new paths, I am so much older, not so much wiser, and it is time to create new paths for me as a mom with an adult daughter. It is a scary process for me, I won’t lie. For three weeks while she was here with me in Phoenix, I pretended I could avoid that process . . . pretend it would stay this way and she would always be here when I got home from work, that we could laugh and cuddle up on my bed, me pretending she is little, maybe her pretending too. . . just for a little while.

Unfortunately come 9 a.m. this morning I left her in the Skycap line at the airport I struggled with letting go again. I had to say Goodbye. I didn’t want to, but I did. Tonight I am taking a little comfort knowing that before she left (me knowing today would hurt my heart) she helped me to set up Skype on my computer so we can see each other via web cams while we talk online. We have already texted and I am sure we will be in touch by phone. I wonder how moms from the past did this without all the technology, how painful it must have been for them. See . . . I am already looking on the bright side of things. Well, I am trying anyway.

So, until I see her again I will work on planning how to pack the most joy and laughter into whatever time I can get, maybe a spring break, maybe the whole summer, and hope that the refill of love I received in the last 3 weeks from my daughter lasts until Southwest Airlines delivers her back to me!

To all of you out there with children that have not left for the real world yet . . . go find them right now, hug them, play a game with them, cuddle if they will let you. It is all over far too fast. Eighteen years is not enough . . . trust me, goodbye gets here faster than you think.