All I Can Do Is Walk Him to the Bus Stop

My son is eight. He is, for the most part, a calm and responsible boy. He can get carried away with silliness. He sometimes cries about ridiculous things, like the need to wear jeans to school when it is 20 degrees outside. But I trust him as much as I would trust any eight year old. Even so, I have taken to walking him to the bus stop most mornings. I do this partly for him because he is the only one at the bus stop in the mornings. But if I examine my motives carefully, I realize I don't think that being alone at a bus stop is such a terrible thing. The ability to be alone is quite valuable, in fact, and alone for two minutes while waiting for a bus filled with peers is probably not entirely a bad thing. So I have come to realize that, mostly, I am walking Adam to the bus for myself.

I walk my son to the bus because if I don't, I stand at the front door and watch him cross the street and then walk away, out of sight. He walks confidently but without deliberation, as though this is what he does on a normal day, as though there never was any question of him walking down the sidewalk to the bus stop, getting on a bus driven by a stranger (granted, it's the same stranger every day,) and then spending the bulk of his day somewhere other than home with me. As he walks, I see double: I see my dependable and intelligent "big boy" going off to be dependable and intelligent where all the other kids his age are; but I also see my baby, my toddler, my preschooler, and he is walking away, going off without me, leaving me. Both sights are irrefutably true. I must let my child go out into the world because I want him to learn to be independent and to learn about the magic of words and numbers and the stories of our history and the marvels we think we know through science. But I must also accept that my baby is just walking away. My toddler is leaving. He is going off into a life that will be his and not mine, that he will control and I will, decreasingly, only influence. He doesn't need my hands to hold him up any more, and he isn't afraid to stand on a corner by himself and then get on a bus and not look back at his mother, standing alone and watching.

Today a broken and bent man went into a school full of children like my son, children whose parents scolded themselves for being silly enough to almost weep every morning when their brave dependable children walked out into the world, and did the worst thing I can imagine a human doing. There, but for the grace of God, go I. And one can't help but know that even with the grace of God, people are there already. I can't imagine there is a parent in America today who isn't wearing the clothes of the parents in Connecticut, who isn't completely undone by empathic pain, who doesn't look at the school pictures of their children hanging in the hall or at the top of the stairs and HURT to the point of near-paralysis, and who isn't thinking of how a person could, before she even knew what was happening, lose everything. How can any of us ever be brave enough to let our children go out into the world? I really don't know.

And yet, I also know that I must. If I love my children--and I do--I will eventually have to let them cross the street by themselves, even if there are reckless drivers in the world, because I want their world to be larger than my modest suburban house and yard. I will have to let them get on the school bus and spend a day at school because I want them to be able to understand the marvelous world they live in and the mostly marvelous people who share it with them. The horrible horrible truth is that I can walk my son to his bus stop every morning, but unless I am willing to force him to grow up in fear, unless I am willing to sacrifice all of the brilliant things he might become and the fantastic journeys he might take during the life ahead of him, I have to let him get on the bus by himself.

Those of us who are in the season of advent have an uncomfortable mingling of Good Friday and Christmas today. Our streets are lined with lights and wreaths, preparing a path, lighting the way, and yet we watch our brothers and sisters as they hang on their crosses and ask how God can allow such pain. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? And yet, since I became a mother, since I felt my son's presence in my womb, for me, Christmas and Easter have become inseparable. Yes, I await that moment of pure joy Christmas Eve when "Silent Night" becomes "Joy to the World," that moment when I transcend hope and actually believe that God is with us, that the kingdom is near, that swords will be beat into plowshares, that "they shall never harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain." But I also think of Mary giving birth alone, save for a man she had only recently married. I think of Mary loving her baby and then watching him grow up and then.... And I think of God, who knew humanity pretty well by then and still let his whole heart be born flesh--the kind of flesh that is first a helpless and dependent baby, the kind of flesh that must be never out of reach of Mama and then eventually learns to walk on his own, the kind of flesh that eventually must go out into the world if He is to experience life in its abundance, if He is to make a difference on this unreliable planet among broken, bent, and hurting humans.

If you've ever watched a beloved child walk down the street to a bus stop, Christmas is equal parts wonder and terror. He will get hurt. He will be grieved, perhaps even unto death.

Lord, have mercy on us.

Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, "This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed--and a sword will pierce your own soul too." --Luke 2:34-35