Blessing the Voyage: Launching Them Without Losing Them

(Graduations are coming over the next several weeks. Some of you will be entering a new and challenging season. I wanted to share what I wish we had done better, what I would have done better. Death has a way of clarifying the places that could have been done better. I’m praying for all of you in this season - and I promise it will get better when we do the hard work.)

Years ago, one of my spiritual and mom mentors said something that has stayed with me ever since: the hardest part of parenting is the transition to being your adult child’s friend. (God bless you, Sally Knipe, for taking us all under your wings)

At the time, I think I nodded along as if I understood.

I had already lived through the hard stages by then, or at least a good number of them. The sleepless nights. The worry that settles into your bones. The constant second-guessing. The discipline years. The teenage years. The seasons where you are trying to hold the line while also trying not to break the relationship. The moments of tenderness that nearly undo you, and the moments of frustration that make you wonder whether anyone in the house will survive to adulthood.

I knew parenting was hard.

What I did not fully understand then was that all those hard stages were leading somewhere. Or maybe more accurately, they are preparing us for one final hard thing.

Letting them go.

Not because we stop loving them.
Not because they stop needing love.
Not because the relationship no longer matters.

But because the shape of love has to change.

And if I am honest, that may be one of the holiest and most painful truths a parent will ever have to learn.

We don’t raise our children to keep them. We raise them to release them.

That sounds lovely written down. Wise, and mature, and spiritual.

It doesn’t always feel lovely in real life.

In real life, letting go can feel like losing. It can feel like rejection. It can feel like being pushed out of a room you spent years building. It can feel like all your love, labor, sacrifice, prayer, and presence are suddenly being met with distance, silence, or boundaries you do not understand.

I will never forget the feeling when PJ was at Ravencrest his first year, and suddenly another adult voice was carrying far more weight than ours ever had. Than mine ever had. I hated it. I felt replaced. Even now, looking back, I can get a little sweaty thinking about the depth of that feeling of rejection and the quiet panic underneath it. Had we lost him? Would he ever come back “home”?

And when that happens, there is something in many of us that wants to hold on tighter.

We call it helping.
We call it protecting.
We call it staying close.

And sometimes that is what it is.

But sometimes, if we are brave enough to tell the truth, it is fear dressed up in more respectable clothing.

I say that gently, because I’m not standing outside this story with a clipboard and a neat set of conclusions. I’m in it. I have been in it. I have loved deeply and still gotten parts of it wrong. I have mistaken distance for rejection. I have taken a boundary personally. I have felt the sting of not being needed in the same way and had to wrestle through what that stirred up in me.

That is part of why this subject still lands in my gut.

Because some truths do not just feel insightful. They feel exposed and raw.

They shine light on places where we wish we had been wiser, steadier, less reactive, more trusting. They remind us that loving well and loving wisely are not always the same thing. And that some of us learned the difference a little later than we wish we had.

I think one of the hardest things about parenting adult children is that the losses are often subtle at first. No one hands you a certificate for it. No one pulls you aside and says, “This is the season where your role will begin to change, and it will break your heart a little, even when it is good.”

But it does.

You lose the version of the relationship where your voice naturally carries the most weight. You lose the easy access. You lose the feeling of being central. You lose the illusion that if you love hard enough and parent well enough, you can protect them from pain, bad choices, distance, confusion, or struggle.

That loss is real.

And I think it is worth saying clearly that grief can exist here too. Not the same grief as death, of course, but grief all the same. Grief over a changing role. Grief over unmet hopes. Grief over relational strain. Grief over the slow realization that motherhood and fatherhood were always going to require open hands, whether we liked that idea or not. And here’s another really hard truth – it isn’t our children's responsibility to hold the grief that we carry over their growing up. It’s ours. All ours.

And this is also very important: loss is not always the same as harm.

Sometimes it is simply the ache of love changing shape.

That has been living in me, because I think it names something important. We often assume that if this stage hurts, then something must be wrong. After all, haven’t we always been told that pain means something that needs immediate attention? If our adult child needs distance, if they begin setting boundaries, if they start making choices we would not make, if they pull away to become their own person, we can interpret that as failure, disrespect, or abandonment.

Sometimes it may be some of those things. Families are complicated, and not every story is healthy.

But often, it is something else. Often it is the clumsy, necessary, holy work of becoming.

Adulthood is not neat work. It rarely arrives polished, and gracious, and easy to interpret. Sometimes it looks like mixed signals. Sometimes it sounds sharper than it should. Sometimes it comes with awkward separation, strong opinions, questionable decisions, and long stretches where everyone is trying to figure out who they are to each other now.

That is not always rebellion.
That is not always dishonor.
That is not always a child throwing love back in your face.

Sometimes it is growth.

One of the places I can look back on now and see PJ figuring out how to break family norms that needed to be broken was when he moved out. I think he knew it would be dramatic if he told us before he had done all the work, and honestly, he was not wrong. It probably would have sent me partially over the edge, even though I knew he needed to move out because he was getting married in six months. He and his fiancée found an apartment, signed the lease, and told us literally ten days before he moved. In the old days they would have said of me, “She took to her bed with the vapors.” I kid…sort of.

And yet even there, looking back, I can see something I could not fully see then. That was not him rejecting us. That was him becoming. That was him beginning to stand on his own feet, to make adult decisions, to separate in ways that were probably overdue and definitely uncomfortable. Uncomfortable for him, not just us. We would do well as parents to remember that our feelings are not the only ones that are a tangled mess – and both can be valid at the same time.

Sometimes it is a young adult trying to hear their own voice. Sometimes it is them trying to figure out what they actually believe. Sometimes it is the painful work of becoming a whole person before God and not simply an extension of their family system.

And now, as I spend time with young adults and walk alongside them in this season of life, I see that tension from another angle, too.

I see young adults trying to grow up while carrying the emotional weight of not wanting to wound their parents. I see how hard it is to set sail when someone you love keeps grabbing the rope at the dock and tying knots that you never even knew existed! I see how often parents think they are preserving relationship when what they are actually preserving is control. I see how often fear gets baptized as wisdom. I see how easy it is for help to become intrusion, for concern to become management, for love to become pressure.

And I see the parents too.

I see how much they love. I see the confusion and hurt. I see how deeply identity can get wrapped up in being needed. I see how terrifying it is when the role you have poured yourself into for decades begins to change, and you are not sure what faithful love looks like anymore.

So, I have compassion for the parents.

Because I am one.

But compassion cannot mean we stop telling the truth.

Holding on is not always what is best.

Sometimes what feels loving to us feels suffocating to them. Sometimes what feels like connection to us feels like control to them. Sometimes the very thing we are doing to avoid losing the relationship is the very thing straining it most.

That is hard truth. But it is still truth.

Eugene Peterson, in A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, wrote, “I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God’s business.” (IF you want a great yearly read…get…this…book! I love it, and I read it often)

That line reaches right into the center of this for me.

Because the temptation in parenting adult children is not usually to stop loving. It is to keep managing. To keep rescuing. To keep inserting ourselves. To keep confusing our anxiety with discernment and our control with devotion.

But our children were never ours in that absolute sense.

They have always belonged to God first. Before they were ever even a thought in our minds, they were His.

We were given the sacred privilege of loving them, guiding them, correcting them, delighting in them, teaching them, praying for them, and helping form them. But we were never meant to be the axis of their adult life. We were never meant to be the voice that drowns out all the others. We were never meant to function as the Holy Spirit.

That is God’s business.

And maybe part of the long obedience of parenting is learning that our role must change without assuming our love has failed.

I think about PJ here, too.

I wonder what words spoken out of extreme pride and admiration for him would have meant instead of words spoken out of panic and fear. I wonder how we might have navigated a few rough seas and gotten to the really good stuff faster and gentler. I wonder what it would have looked like if he didn’t have a mother who sought to be a part of every part of his life, and instead had a mother who stepped aside a little sooner and let him shine all on his own.

It is not that those words were never spoken. They were. But they could have been spoken much earlier and much more often. Maybe that would have softened some of the wondering, for both of us. Maybe he would have known even more deeply just how proud I was.

He has been gone almost nine years next month, and would have turned forty next month, and I will tell you this much: these thoughts and feelings do not get easier to navigate. Time changes some things. It does not remove the ache of hindsight.

That is not easy to write.

It is easier, honestly, to write in broad strokes and polished truths than to sit in the specific ache of knowing I did not always get that part right.

But maybe that is part of why I am writing it at all.

Because I suspect I am not the only parent who has looked back and winced a little. Not the only one who has felt the sting of recognition. Not the only one who has realized that some of what I called closeness may have had fear mixed in. Not the only one who has had to hand regrets to God and ask Him to do something redemptive with what I cannot redo. And not the only one who desperately wants to help another parent not have to navigate the same.

There is grace for that, too.

Grace for the parents who are still learning. Grace for the ones who held too tightly. Grace for the ones who confused worry with wisdom. Grace for the ones who are trying, even now, to figure out how to love differently than before.

And there is hope.

Hope that a strained season is not always the end of the story. Hope that boundaries are not always severing. Hope that space is not always rejection. Hope that love can survive a changing form. Hope that sometimes what feels like losing them is actually making room to find one another again in a new way.

I see the young adults in my orbit trying so hard to navigate the tension of staying close and yet pulling away. They desperately want a relationship with their parents, and they equally want to stand on their own two feet and make decisions without first asking whether something is okay.

There is hope in that tension, too.

Hope that they might have what their parents never did. Or hope that they might take what mom and dad had and grow it into something uniquely theirs, still tied to family but not trapped by it.

That kind of hope matters.

Our young adults do not need us to disappear.
They do not need us to dominate.
They need something harder and better than both.

They need us to become people who can bless the voyage.

People who can tell the truth without controlling the outcome. People who can offer wisdom without grasping for power. People who can remain a safe harbor without insisting on being the captain of the ship.

They need us to let go of the dock ropes.

They need us to pop the champagne cork and cheer as they set sail. They need us to stand on the dock of their own life, waving until they cannot see us quite as clearly anymore. Not because we are being left behind forever, and not because they are disappearing over the horizon never to be seen again, but because this is what it means to launch well.

They are rounding the corner of the harbor jetty.
They are hoisting their sails.
They are letting their own life catch the winds God has been gathering for them all along.

And if we have loved them well, if we are learning to love them well still, then they will know where the harbor is.

They will know we are here.

They will know that when they come back into view, weathered or joyful, full of stories, carrying grief, carrying growth, carrying whatever the voyage has brought them, we will be standing on the dock waving just as hard when they return as we did when they first pulled out of the slip.

Maybe that is the last great work of parenting.

To love with open hands.
To bless what we cannot control.
To trust God with what we most cherish.
To loosen our grip without closing our hearts.

We raise them to let them go.

Not because letting go is easy.
Not because it does not hurt.
Not because we always do it well.

But because love that is secure enough to release is one of the deepest gifts a parent can give.

And maybe, by the grace of God, what feels at first like losing them becomes, in time, the beginning of a new kind of welcome.

Photo by Jay Alexander on Unsplash