The big kid

Yesterday was the kid's first day at her new school.

  

How is it that this doesn't get easier -- letting them go each year, shuffling them back into the frothing stew of humanity, where you can't protect them? I thought it would get easier. It doesn't.

It's been particularly anxiety-inducing this year, with the kid heading into a new school. I was talking to the boyfriend the other night about my fears, qualifying each hysterical, over-protective statement with, "I know it's probably just because I'm her mom..." or "I guess every mother feels like this...", which is all well and good and may in fact be the truth of the matter, but this is MY BABY we're talking about here. I'm allowed a little unwarranted hysteria, am I right? 

So I rambled on about how sensitive she is, how it worries me because I see so much of myself in her in that way. She feels things deeply and takes things to heart, perhaps too much. And so at moments like these I have to struggle hard to separate out my experience of school -- which was painful and exhausting and lonely (my family moved, like clockwork, about every 3 years on average... I was perpetually The New Kid, always on the outside) -- with hers, which can, should, and thus far has been, very different. This maternal projection, the worrying, the overprotectiveness -- it's residue from my own childhood, not the reality of hers. I know that, deep down. I do. And yet...

The boyfriend listened to my babbling quietly and then smiled. "She's a strong kid, a tough kid. You have nothing to worry about. Really."

And something in me that was clenched relaxed, just a little.

As a mother, it's difficult to see your own kid for who they really are, wholly separate from you and your influence, your projections, your fears and hopes. But he's right: my daughter is strong. And sensitive. And many other things, some of which resemble me and my character, and some her father's, and some are just her. Her alone, and nothing like anyone else. 

And with each year she becomes more and more her own person, more singular in every way. This is a good thing, a wonderful thing. Of course it is. It is how it should be, and must be. Her growing independence and individuation means that I'm doing my job as a mother.

So why does my heart still ache like this?