The hardest part of parenthood is letting go.
I am learning to let go in more ways than one. I’m not Elsa at the top of the mountain singing the joy of newfound freedom, “Let it go.” As a child, I dreamed, however naively, I’d find this great love story and have my own children.
I adore my husband, and love and understand him in ways no one else in his life ever has or will. We’ve shared in his family’s rejection, illness, the deaths of his father and mother, our son’s diagnosis of autism, the loss of one of his projects because he had to be at a meeting for Hayes, and now the loss of our daughter.
We are letting go of a past and a future we’d shared with our daughter, Corrie.
After days of feeling completely numb, I cried. I knew a girl with golden brown ringlets would not bounce through the door to say she’d thrown the food scraps in the field, fed the puppies, or picked flowers. I screamed at the sky.
There is nothing like a woman as she attempts to get olives out of the jar for her Mediterranean salad.
The spoon shook. I placed it on the counter. I gripped the kitchen sink, so I wouldn’t fall to my knees.
Hayes said from upstairs, “Hey, stop being loud down there,” before he returned to acting out The Land Before Time with his dinosaurs.
Hayes in 2013 in a time before Corrie when it was the three of us.
I am in the process of letting go of more than one child. I’ve observed my son turn to his father, and John embrace Hayes at almost ten-years-old.
John said, “As children get older, sometimes they look to the parent who’s the same gender.”
John gave up so much for our son, Hayes.
I wanted Hayes and John to bond. John’s voice has softened towards Hayes. They got into watching one of the two trillion versions of Godzilla.
While I sometimes feel like an old lizard on an experimental island no person in his or her right mind wants to travel to, I know the relationship between Hayes and his father must continue to bud. It doesn’t mean Hayes and I aren’t close as we always have been throughout his life.
Hayes passed out from reading not long after Corrie was born.
We are shifting.
We are learning.
We are letting some things go.
We are beginning new normals.
I want to hold on to him as I often did with Corrie and still with him, when he lets me. My lap was sore when he got a little scared when John put on an Indiana Jones movie the other night. I cherished it because I know although I want to hold on to my only living child, I still need to help him grow and become independent.
By Rebecca T. Dickinson
Corrie's Season 