“Cadets, Family and Friends, please rise. You have 90 seconds to say your goodbyes.”
It’s been three weeks since we heard those words.
It’s been two weeks since we heard his voice.
It’s been four days since we received a letter.
His friends weren’t surprised. His teachers were proud. His community was impressed. His parents braced for the reality. The youngest, our third wheel for eight years, is at Cadet Basic Training at West Point.
He isn’t allowed a phone (unless he is given the opportunity to call - for 10 minutes). He writes diary style: “7/3: Today was brutal. Cadet Smith had to write ‘I will not let my platoon down’ I-don’t-know-how-many times while we were in prone row” “7/4: I really like my roommates which is great because this place is crazy and its nice to talk to someone at night.” “7/5: There is a running joke that I look like Jake Gyllenhaal.” He writes these anecdotal paragraphs for 3-4 days and then it makes its way to Stowe as I check the mailbox daily.
I know his address by heart. I should. I write him every day. From the mundane (I can’t tell you why our woodchuck neighbor likes one clover patch over another) to the exciting (Barack Obama will be honored at West Point in September). I think of him receiving these little notes whenever he can pick up his mail and I hope it brings him some rest from his weariness.
I thought I would be done crying every day. I remember my father telling me, “when you left, Jule, you broke your mother’s heart.” My mother had died many years before my Dad decided to share this with me. He wasn’t thinking about how that would land (not well, obviously - the GUILT!). As the youngest of four, I was her baby. But now, I know how she felt - my heart is broken, my baby has started his next chapter without us.
But this is what you sign up for when you agree to be a parent. Children break our hearts. They are supposed to. They must live their own life despite us. Carl Jung says, “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents.” If we were clinging on to him, he wouldn’t have taken the chance on himself. It is right to let him go. Just because it is right, doesn’t make it easy.
Recently, I have learned, all things in nature have three instincts, Self-Preservation, Social, and Sexual instincts. According to Russ Hudson (and this is the very basic information to start - more to follow in upcoming blogs):
Self Preservation: The attunement to my internal and external physical environment - What do I need to survive?
Social: About the Other - to connect, relate, and know each other.
Sexual: (pretty self-explanatory) It’s about sex but also about “what turns you on.” Not necessarily intimacy (as I was taught in my first Enneagram Certification course and corrected by Russ).
Discovering how these play out in our lives is my new personal growth work. Depending on life circumstances, they stack with two dominating and one as a blindspot. This West Point experience is a great place to become aware of these instincts playing out. I would say, right now Social and Self-Preservation are jockeying for first place. Unfortunately, Sexual Instinct is a distant third.
In the case of the Social instinct, one of our motivations is to protect our young. This instinct has been front and center for the past 34 years, especially for the past three weeks. This recent unfulfilled instinct to protect, feels vast, a void in which a phone call or letter just drips a teeny tiny drop into the chasm of an instinct now searching (albeit fruitlessly) for fulfillment elsewhere. Our purposes need to pivot and be redefined. Our instincts will restack.
When we said goodbye three weeks ago, he was all smiles, ready for the challenge. We weren’t ready.
When we heard his voice two weeks ago, it quivered now and again and we both wanted to jump through the phone and save him.
When we read his letters, we weep at the challenges he faces, alone, for the first time without us. We can’t come to his rescue and the feeling is felt deep in my belly as the pain of this inability, this inevitability, is gut-wrenching.
He now looks to roommates, his company, his platoon, his mentor, and his Field Force officer for support. Of course, we will always be family, but now his family has extended and it is something we won’t be a part of despite how many football games we attend or West Point Parent groups we join.
His journey has his Social Instinct on top of the heap of Instincts. I would imagine for him, Self-Pres is a close second. Sexual Instinct? Well, I don’t want to think about that one.
Our journey has our Social Instinct shifting. This fresh chapter, right now, lacks the fun we had raising children. The two of us just try to Self-Pres on a daily basis, passing the time until we get to visit the youngest, while the older ones visit us to keep us sane.
Who knows, maybe my Sexual Instinct will rise to the top of the stack. Sexual, Self-Pres, Social - in that order. A new order. Hmmm. Sounds interesting. This menopausal woman can only hope.