By Julie Ballantyne Brown, guest blogger

I don’t want to go totally melodramatic on you. But there’s this one teensy thing that’s just starting to sink in. The feels are getting a little jumbled. Because my son isn’t coming home anymore.

This is his fourth year of college. He hasn’t lived “at home” full time in almost four years.

Of course he’ll come to visit sometimes. Christmas, if we’re lucky, or the occasional weekend. But he’ll be living two-and-a-half-ish hours away. Living, not going to school, but living. He’ll be going to work; going, gulp, home; and doing it all over again the next day.

My son is adulting

For us, there’s no more Spring Break, no more summers off. He’ll be really and truly adulting now. Marty and I were just talking the other day about how we’ll take him off of our insurance as soon as his kicks in. Again: gulp.

Now there are proud mama moments in this, too. My Oldest Child has a grown up job. Well, he will as soon as he graduates in May. He went through the interviews, the stress of not knowing, all that jazz, and he succeeded. He has a big boy job on the other side of the state doing something that he loves and finds interesting.

This, of course, is awesome. He’s worked so hard, he’s always been an amazing kid, and he deserves every bit of good that’s coming his way.

Yet the finality of it is starting to hit home, as I clean the empty bedroom where the college kids stay when they come home. I’ll be making up two beds, but only one will be slept in this summer when Middle Child comes home. We’ll pass along Older Child’s basement storage boxes to him, the extra clothes that he’s left behind in the bedroom, his stuffed puppy, Sadie. He’s on to building his own life.

As well he should!

Raising self-sufficient kids

This is what we raised him to do. This is the job of parenting: to make our children independent so that they can survive on their own. (Coming in second only to being a good person. Raising kids to be good humans is always first on the list, but self-sufficiency is a close second.)

He’s following the natural order of things and doing a damn fine job of it: working, paying his own bills, buying his own car and paying for repairs. He even has a cat, for crying out loud!

But my mama heart is cracking a little tonight as I remember the baby who loved to cuddle and whose hair smelled so sweet, the inquisitive toddler who made friends with everyone and everything, the studious tween, the social butterfly of a high school student, and now the proud graduate.

Those are my memories – and precious ones. He’s going to make his own memories now: his first place, his first real job, and all of the adventures, good and bad, that go with them.

It’s okay, it’s supposed to happen this way. I’m just a little leaky, is all.

Hug your baby, new momma. And get ready: life changes fast!

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About the guest blogger:

Julie Ballantyne Brown grew up in the Metro Detroit area of Michigan and is the author of Traveler, as well as Put Up Your Hair, published through Heritage Books. She and her husband have three sons. Besides writing, Julie loves to participate in community theater and is a proud history and genealogy nerd. She also plays a mean game of Words With Friends. One day, she will live in London.

You can find the original version of this article on Julie’s blog, A Place of My Own. And you can read Julie’s thoughts on how to raise kind kiddos in this post, Here’s why you need to teach your kids to be good humans.

Photo credit: engin akyurt from Pixabay