CSI: Lincoln

Early this morning, I found evidence that son Eric made it home last night, despite my not waking to greet him.  On the otherwise clean kitchen counter sat a half-rinsed bowl with a spoon in it, and inside the fridge, the foil that covered last night's leftovers gave up its secrets in crumpled, torn whispers.

Twice in the past week, I've found odd comfort in these leftover trails, signs of a son whose current trajectory is shrinking the size of our concentric circles.

This is as it should be, of course, and all the more reason, I suppose, that our intersections--even those mundane ones outlined in dried spaghetti and tomato sauce--have taken on a deeper meaning for me.

If we parents do the job we are intended to do--training our troops to need us less while encouraging them to explore the larger world even more--then we'd better retrain ourselves to learn to read the detritus that our children's paths leave behind.  Some days, these signs--dirty bowls next to the sink, bikes leaning against the fence, half-zipped backpacks tossed by the back door--are all the proof we have that we did, in fact, give birth to someone once, and that that person still walks the earth.

I'm starting to think that parenting also gave birth to the humble expression "Throw me a bone."  Give me something--anything-- that proves you are still here and that we are made of the same stuff.

To some, this word "detritus" may seem like the wrong word for me to use.  After all, in CSI terms, it means "dead organic material."  But to a geologist (or a parent), it also means "the loose material that comes from disintegration."  Dis-integration.  The act of moving away from something, or someone.


One of the strangest stages of parenting--so far, at least--has been this process of standing back as my kids move into their own lives.  Sure, I could say that our house would be cleaner without them, but--really--the good that comes from them leaving their nest is the act of stretching their wings and building their own lives. It's not that I want them to move away so much as I want them to move towards--towards their own futures, even as those futures may spin ever further from me, like distance planets no longer held by my gravitational pull.