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     Raising children is one of the most difficult, challenging and yet rewarding jobs on this planet.  It can bring tears of joy or sadness to your eyes and it can bring about so much frustration that you sometimes want to pull your hair out of your own head.  Likewise, raising children is challenging to yourself as a person, a woman, a parent.  There is no experience like it and no job more fulfilling.   

     The thing about it is that when children grow older your job as a mom begins to change.  Your child's needs change as he or she goes through the different stages of development.  This can be a tough aspect of parenting to grasp. 

     As I watched my little girl begin to slowly claim her independence as a young adult, it was painful for me to slowly let her go.  It was difficult to adjust to the fact that she was no longer a little girl who required the same watchful eye at eighteen that was needed when she was ten. 

     During my daughter's growing process, I as a parent went through growing pains as well.  I came to realize that she always needed me to be her mom no matter where she was but she didn't always need me in the same way.  She went from needing me to teach her how to stand on her own in order to eventually walk, to teaching her how to do things like cook a meal and do laundry so she can become a self sufficient adult.   

     I realized that my role in my eldest daughter's life was changing significantly and it stirred within me a certain ambivalence.  I was proud of the young woman she was becoming while at the same time beginning to question my own role in life.  What would I do now that my child no longer needs me to do everything for her? 

     There was so much sadness in letting my little girl go while feeling overwhelmed with joy and pride in the job I had done.  Look at her.  She's in college.  She's happy and self-confident.  She was everything I wished I was when I was eighteen.  I had managed to break the cycle that existed in my own family for so many years. 

     That cycle of dysfunction often comes from verbal and/or physical abuse inflicted upon us by the adults who are responsible for our care and well being.  That abuse was a result of frustrated single mothers with no supports in place for all they had to do on a daily basis.  Thankfully, I found a way to raise my daughter differently by learning from the mistakes that my mother and grandmother made in their own parenting styles. 

     I may not have been successful in the relationship department in terms of my own marriage, thereby, repeating the single mother cycle but at least my daughter is more emotionally stable, academically focused and socially successful than I was in my youth.  That part of parenting is especially rewarding.  When you can see the fruits of your hard labor in the eyes of your child and smile with pride, you know you've done a good job and that makes letting go so much easier.  

     Inevitably my child will make mistakes from which she will hopefully learn and I was terrified for her when she walked out my door.  I cried for her and mourned what I thought was the death of our relationship.  Our relationship didn't die.  It transitioned.  When she began turning to me for advice and wanting to be around me even though she was no longer living in my home, I realized that our relationship was much more sound than I had given it credit for being. 

     Today I look at her and I'm proud of who she is becoming as a young woman.  I am grateful for the transition that our relationship had to make.  We are not friends.  We are mother and daughter.  There is love and a bond between us that I couldn't have with my own mother.  No matter how painful it was to allow my eldest child to walk out of my home and into her own world, it was a growing pain we both had to go through.  It was necessary so that our relationship with one another could strengthen and so that we could each become stronger as individual women.

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