10/06/2026
PARENTING 101 — POST #6 💖
THE SPACE BETWEEN HOLDING ON AND LETTING GO
There comes a point in parenting when holding on too tightly is no longer protection.
Gripping our children’s hands so tightly that we prevent them from fully living their own lives can become more about our fear than their freedom.
That’s a difficult truth for me to admit, because control can disguise itself beautifully as love.
At times, I was a control freak.
After Emily died, I was desperately afraid I would lose another child.
Of course I wanted to keep everyone close.
I already knew what it felt like to have a child ripped from my life. Somewhere inside me, staying vigilant felt like it might keep the unthinkable from ever happening again.
Fear told me that if I watched closely enough, worried hard enough or controlled enough, maybe I could keep everyone safe.
But fear and love are not the same thing.
Our children need us.
And they need the freedom to leave us.
Both things can be true.
Our task is not to remove the journey from them, but to become a safe place they can return to while giving them enough space to discover who they are.
Safety is not control.
Protection is not possession.
And love is not the elimination of all risk.
I’ve had to learn this repeatedly as a mother.
There were times I wanted to step in, fix things, make the road easier or protect my children from consequences I could already see coming.
Sometimes I did.
Other times I couldn’t.
And well, honestly, with the 20/20 vision only hindsight gives us, there were times I probably shouldn’t have.
That’s the gift—and sometimes the sting—of looking back.
We can see things from here that we simply couldn’t see from there.
Because our children are also our teachers.
They expose our fears, our need for control, our projections and the wounds we may still be carrying from another time.
Parenting has been one of the greatest hero’s journeys of my life.
Now, as a grandmother, I get to experience it from a completely different seat.
I watch Chance and Jessy raising Sunny and Lennon, making their own decisions and creating a family through their experiences—not mine.
My role has changed.
I am Nonna.
I can love and listen.
I have learned to share wisdom when it is welcomed.
And ultimately, most importantly, remember:
Their journey belongs to them.
And maybe that’s where the ache lives.
We spend so much of parenthood caring for what is precious to us.
Tiny hands crossing the street.
Rocking feverish bodies in the middle of the night.
Setting boundaries.
Breathing hope into prayers.
Then one day, they begin making choices we cannot make for them.
And love asks something different of us.
Trust.
Not because we love them less.
Because we love them enough to let their life belong to them.
That’s fu***ng hard.
We spend years teaching our children how to walk, only to discover that the destination was never ours to choose.
And if we’re paying attention, something else happens along the way.
While they’re becoming who they are, we’re becoming too.
Each time we release an expectation.
When we bravely choose curiosity over control.
When we take the first brave step back and allow them to stumble, trusting that their struggle belongs to their journey—not ours to prevent.
When we create a safe space for them to come home to without demanding that they stay.
Perhaps that’s what our children have been teaching us all along.
How to guide without becoming their map.
How to love without requiring their life to look the way we imagined it would.
And eventually—
how to open our hands.
Let them go.
And trust that what we’ve built between us is strong enough to remain.
Maybe that is the deepest work of parenting.
Not holding on forever.
Becoming the kind of love they never have to escape in order to become themselves. 💖
