I love a good break up song. But now when I hear them instead of thinking of a man, I think of my kids because sometimes it feels like they are breaking up with me.
There are a few songs that capture the particular heartbreak of kids growing up and leaving home. “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin comes to mind. You think the years will keep giving you time to do things together until you ask, “When you coming home, son?” and your son answers, “I don’t know when.” These are actual texts in my phone right now to Jack and to Emma and even to Henry when he is out running around in the neighborhood. The song is brutal when you listen closely. I used to just get caught up in the sound and the repetition, singing along, oblivious to an adult child’s sting. Now I’m Harry Chapin smacked with the realization of time passing and of losing the constancy of togetherness.
Harry Chapin’s Cat’s In The Cradle
A break-up song may not capture the specific parenting pain that Chapin sings about, but some of the lyrics of these sad songs make me think of my kids leaving home. In the song Land Of Canaan, the Indigo Girls rousingly sing, “For every time you find yourself you lose a little of me.” It’s probably about a lover leaving, but this is also a truth of parenting as kids find their way in the world as they should away from home and away from their childhood bedrooms.
I’m well-versed in the finding yourself aspect of child development; lots of people write and talk about this part of the journey. Parents learn lots of strategies for letting go and practice those from the hour when a baby slips from a mother’s body; the first of many acts of letting go. But we talk and learn less about how to deal with the feeling that we are diminished in some way in our children’s lives whether it be that we have less influence, less time, or fewer experience together.
Do my kids have to break up with me to live full lives? What are the adult boundaries? How often do I call? What are realistic expectations? I guess I could ask Google for suggestions, but I prefer to turn on some music for real advice about weathering a break-up.
Abba sings one of the best divorce songs of all time, “The Winner Takes it All.” But it only takes a little stretch to connect some of these lyrics to my own brand of mothering heartache.
“Somewhere deep inside
You must know I miss you
But what can I say?
Rules must be obeyed.”
The rules of parenting demand that I keep letting go. Truthfully, I really don’t think I’m the loser in this relationship. Most of the time, I’m celebrating the win of well-adjusted kids living independently in the world and my own lovely brand of freedom. Though some weekends, I am wailing “the winner takes it all” and thinking of Jack and Emma breaking up with me.
Inside the loss of living everyday with my kids, all those dull, ordinary hours spent together, there are now shining days of special moments that get their glitter from their fleeting nature. Like a day with Emma spent in London at the theater watching Mamma Mia. I know our hours together are brief. She will go back to California, and I will let go again and again and again. So, I take nothing for granted, and I bask in the closeness of Emma, and in the hope that even as she finds herself, she isn’t losing me.
Then, Act 2 of the musical leaves both of us crying when Donna starts to sing “Slipping Through my Fingers” to her daughter on her wedding day. This is the ultimate parent-child break-up song and one I’ve been crying along to since 2008 when the movie came out and Emma was the girl of the song with “schoolbag in hand leaving home in the early morning,” and I am the mother sitting down with “ a surge of that well-known sadness…letting precious time go by.”
I remember the first time I really felt Emma slipping through my fingers. I dropped her at a debate tournament at a local high school on a Saturday morning. I watched her striding across the parking lot in her professional clothes, black pants and heels, a blazer and her black bag with her golden hair streaming out behind her. I got a glimpse of her as a woman, a flashforward to her future self working in the world, independent and thriving, the guardian of her own life. I drove away when the last bit of her disappeared into the doorway.
I wish I could remember what was playing that day on the radio.
Was it an anthem or a dirge?