Adair Lara's Take On Separation

Normally, I print only excerpts from columns, but this one is too good and too relevant. I have included a link if you wish to see it in its original context.

You Have to Let Them Go

Adair Lara

I WAS WATCHING at Glen Alpine Falls in Tahoe as two kids about 7 and 10 forded a steeply down-rushing waterfall. A single misstep and they would be hurtling down the falls, their tender bodies slamming onto the jagged rock below.

Or so it seemed to me as I watched from below, unable to chew my tuna sandwich. Above, their mother watched, barely visible in a red tank top. I could not see her expression, but I knew from her frozen stance what she was feeling: that she had to trust them, had to let them climb around the falls.

People think that being a parent is a way to express one's natural feelings. I've found that being a mother means getting up every single day and doing exactly the opposite of what comes naturally. You let them cross streets, walk to school by themselves, get on bikes, drive away in 2,000-pound automobiles. There's nothing natural about that. Your heart is lodged permanently in your throat, and yet you are supposed to smile and wave and say, as I do to Morgan as she hits the road, ``Drive recklessly, sweetie. Try to tailgate as much as you can, and exceed the speed limit whenever possible.'' Trying to make a joke of it, because what else can you do? Now Patrick, 19, has just gone off to New York to attend Hunter College. His dad is a wreck. "Patrick's idea of New York is based on 'Friends,'" Jim says grumpily. "Mine is based on 'NYPD Blue.'"

``Why does he have to go, anyway?'' he asked, looking at me as if to say, ``This is your fault. You encouraged him. You took him to that place and made him fall in love with it.''

That's when I remembered, again, going to New York with Patrick when he was 15. He loved even the fact that the deli man was rude to him. I remember, though, watching him trip down the subway steps at 42nd Street as he went off by himself to find a coffeehouse in Greenwich Village to write in after declining to come to a play with me. And I had to just let him.

Patrick himself accuses me of wanting him to go to a nearby junior college, living at home where I can see him every day, where he can come down and borrow my gel and say, ``Hi, Mama,'' in that tender way of his, where I can tell from the way he's digging his spoon into his Honey Nut Cheerios that's something on his mind, and we wait until everybody else is gone, and talk.

``I don't want you to be gone,'' I say, ``but I want you to go.''

He smiles. I tell him about going to Paris when I was 20, deliberately sending myself to a place where something could happen to me. I remember standing at the bow of the ship taking me across the English Channel, the spray hitting my face, and feeling exultant, as if I could see the whole world spread out in front of me. For the first time in my life, no one knew where I was.

I was not thinking about my mother, who had had no say in the matter of whether I could take myself off to Paris or not. I was just going, and that was all.

I remember being 20, and scared -- I cried all the way to the airport, my sister and her boyfriend looking at me curiously -- and how my tears stopped the moment they left me alone. That was 27 years ago, but that girl in her ridiculous long leather coat and her heavy red corduroy suitcase looks at me from across the table and says, ``Don't you have some frequent-flier miles he can use?''

SO HE WENT. I couldn't think of what else to say in the airport, so I reminded him to always look behind him when he was about to leave a car or a room, to see if he was leaving anything behind.

We had to break it to him that we won't be setting him up in an apartment of his own on the Upper East Side. He has a couch in Queens for a week, and then it's up to him to find a place to live.

And all this is fine with me. I'm glad he's gone. Really.

My thoughts returned to the woman watching as her two children played on the rocks amid the steeply down-rushing falls. I realize it only looked that dangerous from where I stood on the rocks below. The mother watching had done what mothers do, assessing the pleasure and adventure against the risk, and let them go.