Sounds Above Me

I'm really missing the creak in the floor upstairs. It has been silenced since Erin left for college three weeks ago, and I find myself listening for it late at night when she should be in bed. She was always scrambling around in the deep hours finishing things that she had put off. Sometimes I would wake to the creak at 1 a.m. on a school night, and know that it would do no good to climb the stairs and remind her that she was bound to be tired and useless the next day. Erin was old enough to know this. The late night and early morning creak reminded me that my parenting approach must shift a bit. Some lessons are best learned by natural consequence, not by tired reminders that fall on deaf ears. So if she spent enough nights creaking around at all hours, she would probably spend one landed face up on her bed, eyes covered and window blinds closed tight as she endured another migraine headache. There was no reason to say "I told you so." There was nothing to do except realize that the creak in the floor meant that sometimes it's best to learn our own lessons the hard way.

When I talk to her on the phone, I ask if she's sleeping well. "Pretty much," she will say. Or, "I'm going to get more sleep tonight." Like so many things about sending your kid off to college, this sleep issue is now truly out of my hands. I can't hear her if she's up padding around long past the hour when she should have been sleeping. I'm not there to remind her that sleep is essential to good health. She knows all this, so I've emptied my hands for a while of knowing whether knowledge is translating into action. It is true: you do the best you know how as a parent, then you send them off and hope something stuck.

Tonight it will be quiet in our bedroom - no sounds above our head in the empty second story. But somewhere around 1 a.m., if I wake up with that instinctual parental jolt, I'm certain that I'll long to hear the creak in the floor upstairs again.