The Mast-Head: The First Goodbye

It would be best if I spared our eldest child my emotional confessions, but the house is now very different with her packed off to school in Delaware.

Her room will need a cleaning, but it is mostly empty with all the clothing she cared about taken along, the rest in piles for hand-me-downs. Leo, who was supposed to be her pig, remains, of course, resting on his bed by the fireplace as I work this morning. It is bittersweet; I know it is the best thing for her, but I miss her a whole lot.

Parents of younger children tend toward incredulous when I offer my observation that by the time kids reach their early teenage years they have learned just about all they will from their parents. I suppose it depends on the individual child, but it seems to me at least that by high school, the real education comes from peers, teachers, and interactions with all that can be found beyond the walls of home.

The seminomadic herding people of East Africa send their boys away to tend the animals and roam the hills when they reach that volatile moment, when they are first becoming men. I had heard it explained as a way to keep their meddlesome adolescent energy at a distance from the home camps, but it seems to me as much an education by doing as anything else. Can we find a parallel in our shooing American children out of their rooms and away from their smartphone screens for their next big phase of self-development? Maybe.

Boarding school was really our daughter Adelia’s choice. If she found a place that suited her, and we could afford it, we were not going to stand in her way, we said. There was a period during the process when she seemed eager to get as far away from East Hampton as possible.

“Daddy,” she said more than once, “can I go to school in London?” We visited a school in California. She asked about Paris. Obviously, this was not a kid we were going to be able to keep down on the farm, as the old song goes.

It is a cliché that childhood goes too fast, and it is difficult to write about this without getting maudlin. It is astonishing to think, though, that the baby who so few years ago would not go to sleep unless she was being bounced and held, is now off on her own in the great big world.

Good luck, kid. I’m proud of you.