{"id":206,"date":"2010-07-28T21:42:15","date_gmt":"2010-07-28T21:42:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.katrinakenison.com\/2010\/07\/28\/parents-day\/"},"modified":"2010-07-28T21:42:15","modified_gmt":"2010-07-28T21:42:15","slug":"parents-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/parents-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Parents Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/span>You\u2019d think I would be used to it by now, the simple fact that my children have grown up.\u00a0 Yet time after time the bittersweet truth hits me again, in some new and unexpected way.\u00a0 A memory surfaces, vivid and fresh as this morning\u2019s sunrise–Henry at twelve, wearing a too-big Hawaiin shirt and a pair of cool sunglasses, playing Steely Dan\u2019s \u201cTime Out of Mind\u201d on the piano; or Jack, fourteen and all intensity and focus, as he reaches down to turn up his amp for a guitar solo on \u201cAutumn Leaves.\u201d\u00a0 And in a flash my eyes fill with tears and my heart swells up, as I realize how far we\u2019ve already traveled from those moments. Life rushes forward. Except for those rare and precious circumstances when it affords us, instead, the poignant pleasure of circling back — back to a place we\u2019ve been before, a place that\u2019s stayed the same even while we ourselves have changed and grown and moved on.<\/p>\n

Nine years ago Saturday, Steve and Jack and I drove into the woods of western Maine for our first Parents Day at Camp Encore\/Coda.\u00a0 We took our seats in the dimness of an old post-and-beam barn on the shores of a quiet pond, and watched our son Henry play jazz keyboards for the first time in his life.\u00a0 The song was Herbie Hancock\u2019s \u201cWatermelon Man.\u201d\u00a0 He took a little solo, glanced out to where we sat in the audience, and flashed us a grin.<\/p>\n

Music camp had been my idea, not his. Three weeks earlier, we\u2019d delivered our boy into the hands of a couple of friendly college students, who promised him a fine time in Starfish cabin.\u00a0 And then we hugged him good-bye and left him there, shy and frightened, with a nervous stomach ache and a black trunk full of carefully labeled shorts and tee-shirts, pre-addressed and stamped envelopes for letters home, bug spray and sweatshirts and music books.\u00a0 As we pulled out onto the dirt road beyond the parking lot, I realized that my own stomach felt kind of queasy.\u00a0 And I wondered if, in my desire to expand our son\u2019s world and build his confidence, I\u2019d perhaps pushed a little too hard and a little too soon.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until we returned and saw him standing on the corner of the Old Music Hall stage, holding his own in a jazz band comprised of a bunch of other eleven-year-old kids, a look of pure joy on his face, that I knew for sure:\u00a0 painful as it had been to insist that our boy leave home for the first time in his life, the journey now belonged to him.<\/p>\n

Jump forward nine years.\u00a0 It is Saturday, and I am in the audience at Parent\u2019s Day again.\u00a0 My son is a senior counselor, with piano students of his own to teach, a jazz workshop to lead, concerts to perform and camp musicals to play.\u00a0 The memories come rushing back as I sit in the old barn — all the years we have returned to this camp that both of our sons came, in their own turn, to love.\u00a0 All the times we\u2019ve gone through the very same ritual, arriving at the gate early on a mid-summer morning, parking the car in a freshly mown field,\u00a0 following the signs into camp, eyes peeled for one of our boys.\u00a0 How strange, and perfectly wonderful it always was, to sit in a shed in the deep woods of Maine, listening to children and teenagers and adults all making music together.\u00a0 A handful of young string musicians performing the Brandenburg concertos with exquisite nuance.\u00a0 A group of kids in shorts and t-shirts, intently focused on their conductor as they sing Joni Mitchell\u2019s \u201cWoodstock\u201d\u00a0 in pure six-part harmony. A big band comprised of musicians whose average age is fourteen, swinging through intricate jazz arrangements with the panache and creativity of pros.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been four years since Henry\u2019s last sumer here, when he spent seven weeks working his tail off as a CIT.\u00a0 Three years since Jack played lead guitar in the Zappa Rock Band. Camp vanished all too quickly in life\u2019s rearview mirror, another part of childhood that had been lived and loved and left behind.\u00a0 And so, part of what gives rise to so much emotion on this particular morning is my own sharp awareness of time passing. It is not exactly jealousy I feel, as I watch a new generation of parents greeting their children, exclaiming over summer tans, growth spurts, and shaggy hair.\u00a0 I had my turn.\u00a0\u00a0And yet I am overcome, as I walk up the familiar path and hear the sound of a solitary violin being tuned in a practice cabin, both with gratitude for this unexpected homecoming and, at the same time, with a profound, heart-breaking sense of how much is already over.<\/p>\n

My challenge now — as it seems to be every day this summer — is to release my hold on what was, so that I can be grateful and at peace with what is.\u00a0 How well I remember the acute, visceral joy of these reunions.\u00a0 But there is a different joy awaiting me here now, if I can only allow myself to feel it.\u00a0 Not the joy of bringing a much-missed child home at the end of the weekend, but rather the joy of being a mother who has done her job, and is now being offered an opportunity to catch a glimpse of her grown-up son doing his.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You\u2019d think I would be used to it by now, the simple fact that my children have grown up.\u00a0 Yet time after time the bittersweet truth hits me again, in some new and unexpected way.\u00a0 A memory surfaces, vivid and fresh as this morning\u2019s sunrise–Henry at twelve, wearing a too-big Hawaiin shirt and a pair […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,22,27,30,34,35,39,8,9,10,14],"tags":[115,263,294,301,328],"class_list":{"0":"post-206","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-acceptance","8":"category-change","9":"category-family-life","10":"category-gratitude","11":"category-joy","12":"category-letting-go","13":"category-midlife","14":"category-parenting","15":"category-parenting-boys-parenting","16":"category-parenting-teens","17":"category-soul-work","18":"tag-change-2","19":"tag-letting-go-2","20":"tag-midlife-2","21":"tag-motherhood","22":"tag-parents-day","23":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/600x600.png?fit=600%2C600","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}