Here’s to independence, especially family
July Fourth. It’s a holiday we celebrate in many different ways, from parades, to cookouts, to plotting a special kind of hell for our neighbors who set off firecrackers at random times. And although it falls at the beginning of summer vacation, our nation’s birthday marks that point in the retail calendar when the chances of buying patio furniture or a bathing suit in a size other than extra small are as slim as the odds of the ice-cream truck playing a song I actually want to listen to as it crawls through my neighborhood.
No matter how you celebrate, it’s clear that we value our independence. After all, the whole thing started almost 250 years ago as we struggled to free ourselves from the grasp of an unstable tyrant who thought he was the center of the universe. It’s a point of pride, until we stop to consider that we are still struggling to free ourselves from the grasp of an unstable tyrant who thinks he is the center of the universe. But I digress.
This year, the idea of Independence Day means a little bit more for my family. Our middle daughter recently started living on her own in an apartment. This development really shouldn’t come as a surprise. As delightfully sparkling as I consider my personality to be, deep down I’ve always known that my hobbies and pastimes, which include nagging, more nagging, and yelling at and about the news, would eventually lose their luster and my children would strike out on their own in search of quieter pastures.
Our oldest daughter wasted no time moving halfway across the country to Minneapolis after she graduated from college, although I prefer to think of this as a testament to the confidence and independence we’d instilled in her and not a desire to move just beyond my vocal range. But the path to independence hasn’t always been as clear for our middle daughter.
Years ago, when my hobbies also included visiting as many pediatric specialists as possible, a caseworker told me after a particularly difficult evaluation by a developmental pediatrician, that maybe, with a lot of hard work, our daughter might someday be able to live in a group home. That assessment left me uncharacteristically speechless, but as I drove home with my daughter I vowed to prove she’d underestimated both of us.
There were times, though, when I wondered if it would really be possible. Parenting is a long, drawn out exercise in letting go. We knew that when we brought her home from a Russian orphanage when she was 18 months old, although we also quickly learned she was going to need more time in the nest than her siblings. So when she finally felt ready to try living on her own, the idea was stranger to us than it was to her. At the age of 24, she has never been away from home overnight on her own. There were no camps and no sleepovers, and she lived at home for the two years she attended Hudson Valley Community College.
We found her a nice apartment five minutes from our house. This gave us both peace of mind and allowed her to stay well within my vocal range. The other night she texted to tell us that her power had gone out. I did not offer to have her come to our house, and she did not ask. I decided not to examine too closely whether this was a sign of maturity on her part or the fact that the battery backup still powering her Xbox meant that this was not yet a crisis situation.
There will be setbacks, I know, as she finds ways to cope with the understandable anxiety that comes from living on her own for the first time. As long as none of those coping methods involve the possibility of jail time, we will weather what comes our way. Her life will look different than it did when she was living at home — I know there will be too much screen time and not enough vegetables. But finding her own path is a necessary step to becoming an independent adult, and my allowing her the room to find that path, mistakes and all, is a necessary step to letting go.
So here’s to independence: yours, mine, and our nation’s. It’s a little quieter at our house this Fourth of July. That is until that neighbor starts up the firecrackers.