Roots and Wings

The Boston Herald

Dottie Scott took the framed print off her wall and gave it to me the summer before my first child was going off to college. "There are two things you give your children. One is roots, the other is wings.” I hung this saying in my office, above my desk, so I've been forced to think about it regularly over the years. Roots have never been a problem for me. They have been easy to give. Wings, on the other hand, continue to elude me. When my son was 11, he went off to baseball camp for a week. I carried on as if he'd just joined the army. I still get melancholy when the moment comes for one of my children to pack his bags and leave home.

Only recently did it dawn on me that it's normal to feel sad, that giving your children roots and wings is a nice turn of phrase, but it doesn't make much sense.

Roots anchor a plant to the ground. Strong roots enable trees to withstand winds and tempests and forces that birds, with their graceful, beautiful wings but without the shelter of a tree, could never survive. Trees get their strength from their roots.

But life rooted to the ground is stuck one place. Put wings on a tree and it still couldn't fly. To unearth it, to attempt to get it airborne, you'd have to pull up its roots. To free it, you'd have to kill it.

So why the mixed message to people? Give your children roots but give them wings, too? As if this is possible. As if what has been nourished day after day, year after year, all the elements that make up family life - love, caring, laughter, routine, ritual - aren't entwined in these roots, as if a lifetime of interconnection can be yanked up with a tug and painlessly borne away.

My youngest child is going to New York City for the summer. She's enrolled in a theater program. She was enrolled in a different theater program last year. Then I went with her. This year she is going on her own, living in a dorm, living away from me. It is time. She is 17. She is old enough. People who've sent their children to camp for years shake their heads and laugh at me when I tell them that I will miss her. They say, "It's only four weeks. You won't even know she's gone."

But I'll know.

I am accustomed to the rhythm of my children's days. Their comings and goings, the sound of their doors opening, their footsteps on the stairs, their music, their laughter, their chatter on the phone, their sighs, their complaints, their observances, their constant epiphanies have been the background music of  my life.

I like the music. I like my children. Is this abnormal? I've always liked them. I've always preferred their company to anyone else's. I liked them  when they were babies, and needed to be carried and fed and cared for. I liked them when they were toddling around, full of energy and questions and wonder. I liked them when they raced up the walk on short legs in a hurry to show me pictures and stories they'd created at school. I liked them when they were 12 and 13, when they didn't think they liked me. I liked them when they were 14 and 15, when they didn't much like themselves.

Now two of them are adults and the youngest is teetering on the brink and I still like them. I like the people they have grown up to be.

They're all living at home, at least for now. The oldest returned from Florida, is working in Boston and looking for a place in the city.  The middle one is out of college, working, dreaming of a place in Maine, but still living at home. The youngest, about to move out for the summer, doesn't leave for a few more days.

I treasure the rare nights when everyone is home, when the front light has been shut off and the television is on but no one is watching because everyone is talking and everyone has something to say.

I can see the roots then, the bonds that connect us, that make us family, that make our family strong. Wings will someday take my children away, but at the expense of this. This living, breathing, singular, solid thing that we are together won't always be. What will take its place are my children's families, loving, laughing, caring, growing their own roots and growing strong.