By Claire Guo, Co-Editor-in-Chief
Dear Mom,
Please stop worrying so much about me.
Looking at my room right now, you may see heaps of clothes everywhere. You may have noticed that my driver’s permit has expired. And you may have realized that I have lost like three or five or 20 water bottles at school over the years. But I promise you, Mom, that I will be just fine.
Oh, I can see the alarm bells ringing in your head. This is the year you will watch me start applying to colleges, the year I turn 18 and start pretending to be an adult. This is the year you must let me go.
And you’ve got to let me go, Mom. I can’t tell anymore if you’re joking when you say you and Dad are moving to wherever I’m going to college.
Eventually, I’m sure I’ll make sense of all these “life skills” you keep talking about. Cooking? Psshhh, I only burned that tuna sandwich because I wasn’t paying attention. Does that make you feel better? No? Okay. Just remember that these are the kind of dumb mistakes I have to make before I learn.
You once told me that you felt like you were losing me to a world I wasn’t even ready to face yet. And the truth is, you are losing me a little bit. I won’t be there anymore to ask you to bring my homework to school in the middle of the day. Or to holler “Mommm” across the house. Or to ask you where the white jacket I lost track of three weeks ago is. Nah, I’ll just be there for the good stuff, like Thanksgivings and spring breaks, and for the vaguely worrying phone calls in which I admit I need your advice.
You may not remember, but you were once like me. Young. Oblivious. Sleep-deprived. But you figured it out, right? How to cook, how to manage your time and eventually, how to get a job.
I’ll figure it out, too, Mom. You have trained me well.
Your daughter (who will probably turn out okay),
Claire
To all Conestoga parents struggling with letting their kids go, don’t worry. They’re going to be just fine. After all, they survived Conestoga, didn’t they?
