Saturday, January 2, 2010
The kids (Kids? Who am I kidding? They’re adults now, married college students with plans and aspirations and their own budding identity as a married couple.) are sightseeing in D.C. Our daughter has seen most of it before, but it’s all new to her husband of four days. We drove them into town to save time and save them being in the frigid wind. Still trying to save our children; it’s what we’ve imagined we’ve been doing, what we’ve been trying to do, I guess, these long years of child raising.
My wife and I thought through what remaining things we needed to do over the next weeks to help the pair. We didn’t come up with much. After the focus of these last days (and months and years) on our daughter, our day-to-day involvement is tapering off. The nest is truly nearly empty. Raising children, the focus of most of our nearly 29 years of marriage, is nearing an end and we are a little disoriented. Thank God we’re good friends happily married because without that, we’d be nowhere with not much to fall back on. Those years of putting the emotional, relational oxygen masks on ourselves first* are paying off.
Also, we’re grateful we made the transition from parent-child to adult-adult in our relationships with all three of our children. We’re still their parents, but also, now, fellow adults.
In the evening we needed to pick up their car. I’d taken it to my trusted auto shop and it was getting needed work. We were there a bit early so went into Del Ray, a part of Alexandria I think of as a little Brooklyn. Stopped at a place called Cheesetique, a shop my wife had noticed for some time. We thought it was just a little specialty store but it is also a wine bar, so we had a wine and cheese quickie date. We asked the waiter to choose for us, a less expensive wine and some potent cheese. He selected a pungent, blue goat cheese and an Australian red, both excellent. Not that we didn’t already know it, but it was pleasant and satisfying to enjoy being together, sharing a relatively brief but satisfying mini-date. I think we’re going to enjoy this next part of our lives.
(*In the safety instructions for passengers on a plane, those traveling with small children are asked to put the oxygen mask on themselves first. If they don’t do that, how can they be available to help the child? It’s an image I find useful to understand, and at times justify, taking actions that help or benefit or are good for me.)
