“Never compare your insides to someone else’s outsides.”

For some time now, we have been at an age when good friends are sending their last children off to college. I have read their tearful, hopeful posts, and I have comforted them as they weep and worry, but having never experienced that particular situation myself, I don’t think I 100% got it. I always thought there should be more relief than loss, more celebration than consternation, more pride than panic. After all, my friends are sending their progeny out into the world for which they have been preparing them since birth. Isn’t that what they’ve been working for all these years?

Then I read this piece written by Rob Lowe for Slate Magazine, and I cried along with him. Lowe succeeded in making me understand how difficult it is to let your children stop being children. I’m sorry, friends, that I didn’t get it before.

“…standing among the accumulation of the life of a little boy he no longer is, I look at my own young doppelgänger and realize: it’s me who has become a boy again. All my heavy-chested sadness, loss and longing to hold on to things as they used to be are back, sweeping over me as they did when I was a child.”

Today seemed like the right time to share this lovely article. Go get yourself some tissues. You’re going to need them.

Happy Father’s Day, lovelies.