The Path Ahead
As I write this, Mother’s Day is here, and as you are reading this, my son, Aidan, will be a newly-minted, high school graduate, tentatively stepping into the beginning practicum of becoming an adult. It’s a passage I’ve anticipated and wished to forestall since his arrival on a meltingly hot summer day 19 years ago.
These two markers have me feeling reflective and not a little weepy. Just seeing the graduation placard in front of the house—surreptitiously planted in the wee, morning hours by the secret, St. Mary’s graduation fairies—elicited both delight and tears that seem preternaturally close to the surface these days.
I remember sitting with a six-month-old Aidan on our front lawn, waving at the school bus as it rolled by. I remember thinking, I can’t imagine ever letting this baby get on a bus and go away from me, which is, I imagine, what lots of new mothers think: How I am ever going to do…THAT. Like let him out of my sight. Drive a car. Leave for good.
There are lots of things we can’t imagine ever being able to do or survive, and then, somehow, we do. Sometimes that passage is exhilarating: earning the degree or winning the prize. Sometimes it’s a test of pain and endurance: wading through physical illness or the crushing, all-encompassing agony of heartbreak. Sometimes it’s both. Parenting, as it turns out, is emotions on steroids.
Experience has taught me that most of parenting, like most of living, is a process of figuring it out as you go. When you wonder how you’re going to do something, or survive something, the initial answer is always I don’t know. And then you do … something. You move ahead somehow. You tend to the moment right in front of you because that’s all you’ve got. And as the moments unspool, you survive.
I didn’t know how I’d finish my Master’s degree when I lost my relationship, financial support, car and apartment all in one month, but I did. I wasn’t certain that I would survive being widowed, but I did. I didn’t know how we’d possibly get Aidan through private school, but (with no small amount of determination, grace and generosity) we did. And now, unable to fund any of the colleges to which he was accepted, his dearest friends dispersing like so many dandelion seeds to parts unknown, my son is unsure if or how he will find his way.
There is a beautiful line in a poem by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado that says, “Traveler, there is no path, the path is made by walking.” (“Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.”) I’m thinking about this line a lot lately as my son— now a young man with infinite creative talent and dreams of filmmaking who still hugs me every single day— arrives at this liminal space between the familiar and the unknown; as he, for the first time, enters the exhilarating and terrifying place where there is no path: there is no structure, no map, no rule book. I tell myself, he will make his path by walking.
As will I.
As do we all.
KATE INGRAM, MA, CSBC, is a life transitions coach, counselor, and award-winning author. For support and guidance in navigating the passage and finding your path (or if you’d like to become the patron of a talented, young filmmaker) please contact kate@kintsugicoaching.com or go to kintsugicoaching.com.
