When I left for college, my mother and I both wore sunglasses to the airport, each sparing the other the awkward display of tears. I realize today that the parent's tears and the child's are not quite the same. For the child, those welling eyes signify anxiety, fear, incipient homesickness. The parent suffers sympathetic versions of all of these, but something else as well. For the parent, they are the tears of loss and momentousness, the tears that attend all the great rites of passage and honor the relentless one-wayness of time.
Time does bring good things.
I can't wait to see what books and people my daughter will come to love, the life she will make for herself. I also have the luxury that my orphaned mother did not, of knowing how gratifying relations between parents and adult children can be. My wife and I and our younger daughter have plenty to say to each other, too, and new space to say it in. But no amount of anticipation and no number of new pleasures can disguise the fact of loss. But just because we're not sure exactly when we said goodbye doesn't mean we haven't said it.