CURMUDGUCATION: Parenting Is All About Losing

CURMUDGUCATION: Parenting Is All About Losing

Parenting Is All About Losing

As I've been immersed again in the world of children's music, I'm struck by how much of it is sad. Not "when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall sad," but a kind of melancholic ache behind the music itself.

I think it's the losing.

My wife asked me the other day, "Is it always like this?" We had turned around and had one of those moments when you realize that your baby looks like a small child, an undersized person, but not an infant any more. It's a truly mixed moment emotionally, one part pride and joy at how big your child has grown, and one part sadness and loss because there was an infant just here a moment ago and now that tiniest person is gone forever.

"Yes," I said, and I think back to my older children who are now in their early thirties with children of their own, and I can't even count how many versions of those people have gone by. It's not necessarily all transitions into new versions of themselves, but every step of growth is a step away, a loss of something. You knew everything about them. They lived under your roof and had their own room and you saw them every morning and last thing at night and you were keyed into their every need and then, not in a long slow glide, but in a seemingly endless series if jerks, like tectonic plates snapping past each other, each of those things is lost.

Not that it's all loss and sadness. Every stage of my older children's lives was the best so far, the best until the next new stage revealed itself to be even better. They get stronger and wiser and more terribly beautiful each time. It would never be enough to try to hold them back, to trade the CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Parenting Is All About Losing