Letting Go

Trey Smith

As any parent will tell you, letting go of a child is no easy thing. You've spent the better part of 20 years or so guiding this individual and, consequently, it is often hard to allow them to swim or sink on their own. But a time comes when a child becomes an adult and, when that time comes, the quality parent voluntarily lets go of the reins.

When it comes to a spouse, letting go often means looking out for your partner's best interests and not your own. That's where I find myself today.

Over the past month or so, we have dickered with Della's target date to leave for her AmeriCorps assignment in White Salmon. A lot of this dickering concerned the weather. Understandably, Della did not wish to make the trip in a snowstorm! So, based on long-range forecasts, we had settled on next Tuesday, January 15.

As the time has drawn near, the weather forecast for this weekend have improved significantly. Consequently, I have urged my wife to reconsider and to make her way to White Salmon on Sunday. This will offer her two full days to get oriented before she begins her training on Wednesday.

Now, if I was looking at this situation based solely on my own needs and desires, then I would want her to stick to the original Tuesday departure. I am not anxious in the least to bid farewell to my sweetheart for an indeterminate period of time. I want her to stay with me for as long as possible. But genuinely loving someone else means putting their needs before your own and, in this case, it would be far more beneficial for Della to leave sooner as opposed to later.

And so, though neither of us necessarily is happy with current developments, we have agreed that, barring changes in the weather forecast, Della will leave in the late morning on Sunday. It is the best day for taking a trip as the traffic will be much less than during the workweek and this will be the first time in a long time that Della has made a trip of this distance alone.

When Della drives off on Sunday, I will both be very hopeful and very sad. My hope is that her service in AmeriCorps will be a wonderful experience for her -- personally and professionally -- but I will be very sad that my soul mate is going off without me. I will be sad that my new normal will be a time without seeing her beautiful face everyday.