By Anthony Rowe
One night years ago, my daughter, who was about eight years old at the time, had a realization: when the children in our town of Glenview, Illinois grow up, they leave home and go to college. This upset her greatly. She turned to me and declared with a tearful determination, “I want to go to the University of Glenview!”
I smiled and told her that we would never make her leave our home, avoiding the fact that there was no University of Glenview (plenty of time for that later). I then did what a parent is supposed to do - I comforted and reassured. She felt better and was able to move on.
While the topic of the University of Glenview never came up again, what it represented became increasingly attractive to me - a way to hang on to my daughter and to delay the day when she would leave home. As she grew older, she began dreaming of a life of her own in the world, as I was quietly longing for ways to hold on to her childhood.
In his novel Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman describes the center of time, a place where time stops, and he explains who would go there:
Who would make pilgrimage to the center of time? Parents with children... And so, at the place where time stands still, one sees parents clutching their children, in a frozen embrace that will never let go. The beautiful young daughter with blue eyes and blond hair will never stop smiling the smile she smiles now, will never lose this soft pink glow on her cheeks, will never grow wrinkled or tired, will never get injured, will never unlearn what her parents have taught her, will never think thoughts that her parents don’t know, will never know evil, will never tell her parents that she does not love them, will never leave her room with the view of the ocean, will never stop touching her parents as she does now.
I first came across the above passage a couple of years after my daughter’s University of Glenview declaration. As I read the passage, I nodded because I understood. I understood the desire to make that pilgrimage to the center of time. I understood why a parent would want to freeze a child in place. I understood that I too wanted to protect my daughter and keep her close to me.
As time passed and my daughter grew, I continued to struggle with this desire to stop time and to hold her in place, but, of course, there was no way for me to do so. So we kept on living, and she kept on growing; and I kept wanting it all to just slow down, but it all just wouldn’t.
Eventually, it really was time for her to go off to college. As I mentioned above, the University of Glenview of her eight-year-old imagination never came up. Instead she decided to go to a school in Wisconsin, about three hours north of Glenview.
My fiercest battle with time occurred on the day that we moved her in to her freshman dorm. That evening, alone in my hotel room, something deep and damaging arose from within and overwhelmed me. I cursed time, I screamed, I panicked, I raged. It was me against time, and I was losing badly. I was powerless in the struggle.
I made it through that day. Over the next days, weeks, and months, the passage of time slowly helped to heal my pain, and the short distance between her college and our home meant that we were able to see her frequently. She was away, but she was not gone.
One of the dreams my daughter dreamt as she grew up was to study in Tokyo one day. For many years it seemed to be just that, a dream, until that one day came. She was accepted into a study abroad program and was scheduled to spend a semester in Tokyo starting the fall of her junior year. Just when I had gotten used to having her a morning’s drive away, she would now be embarking on an adventure that would take her to the other side of the world.
On a fall night a few days before she was to leave for Japan, time presented me an unexpected gift. I had been moving through the days leading up to her departure conducting my ongoing internal and futile battles against time when she and I found ourselves on the front porch talking about I don’t remember what. My insides churned with love for her and pity for myself. In the midst of this unremembered conversation, our eyes met and I was struck by a powerful, unmistakable, and overdue understanding - my daughter was no longer the little girl I so desperately wanted to hang on to. Instead, she was a young woman whose eyes confidently communicated to me that she was ready - ready to explore the world and ready to begin creating her own life. It was as though someone had been trying for years to explain something extremely complicated to me, and then that someone finally uttered the simple, exact words I needed to hear in order to truly comprehend.
At that moment I began a long-delayed process of letting go of my magical child and embracing the wondrous adult time had placed in front of me on the porch that night.
And I gained new understandings:
There is no University of Glenview, and there is no center of time. Time moves forward unimpeded, and so will my daughter.
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