The Year Before She Leaves

It is a bright Florida afternoon, the kind of day people move here for. Clear sky, hot sun, the beach calling. My kids don't really like the beach. Neither do I. Most days I think I live in the wrong state, and then I remember I chose it, and I stay.

That is not what I came here to say.

My daughter is sixteen, turning seventeen, a rising senior. She has been planning her future since before most kids think to. Working with a coach, building programs, choosing every class like it matters, because to her it does. She is aiming high. Higher than I would have dared at her age. Whether the doors open is in God's hands. My job is to do my part. That has always been the only part I could control.

So I have been doing it. The practical part. The forms, the deadlines, the financial aid, the numbers. I move through that work with ease because numbers have always made sense to me. I can navigate a spreadsheet in my sleep. What I cannot navigate easily, it turns out, is the quiet.

Because somewhere between the applications and the essays, it hit me. She is leaving. Not someday. Soon. In less than a year she will pack a room I am not standing in, fall asleep in a building I have never seen, in a city where she knows no one and I know no one either. She will be on her own. And she is my youngest.

She has been my partner through all of it. The good and the hard. More than anyone, she has been the one beside me, the one who stayed close while I rebuilt a life. So when I think about her leaving, I have to keep reminding myself of what is true. I am not losing her. I never will. This is only a different season for both of us, one where she is not down the hall anymore. But the house, which has already gone quiet, will go quieter still.

I will not pretend that part feels good. It does not.

I caught myself doing the thing mothers do. Pulling out old photos and crying over a girl who is still very much alive and very much in the next room. Asking myself the unanswerable questions. Did I teach her enough? Did I miss something? What did I forget to say? Is she ready? The spiral is easy to fall into, and it pretends to be love, but it is really just fear wearing love's clothes.

Then I heard something that stopped me. Lewis Howes, talking about how he trains for his future self the way he trains his body. Not waiting to become ready when the moment arrives, but practicing now for the person that moment will require. He has small daughters, barely walking, and he is already preparing to be the father their teenage years will need.

And I thought, that is it. That is the question I have been asking backwards.

I keep asking whether she is ready. But I cannot live inside that question, because it is hers now, not mine. The question that belongs to me is a different one. Who do I need to become before she goes?

So I am giving myself a date. May of 2027. The month she crosses the stage and the countdown ends. I am not going to wait until then to figure out who I want to be on the other side of it. I am going to practice being her now.

I want to know who that woman is. How she spends a quiet morning without filling it with worry. How she carries herself into a room. How she talks about her daughter being gone without flinching, and means it. How she builds the work she keeps putting off, the writing, the speaking, the version of herself she keeps promising to make time for. I have time coming. More of it than I have had in years. And I already know how I want to meet it. Not with grief, because there is no grief in watching someone you love step into exactly what they were built for. It will be hard, of course it will. But hard and proud can live in the same breath. I want to meet that season the way I want to meet every season now. As a woman who is always evolving, who shows up with joy, with hope, with excitement for whatever comes next.

I do not have this all figured out. I am at the very start of asking. But I know the direction

I am walking now, and I have already started practicing.

If something big is coming for you too, sooner than you feel ready for, try it with me.

Picture yourself on the other side of it. Six months out. A year. Five. Not the circumstances. The person. How she stands, how she speaks, how she meets the morning. Then start practicing today.

She is leaving, yes. And I am excited for her. I have spent her whole life raising her to fly as high as she possibly can, and now she is about to. That was always the point. Who I am when she does, though. That part is still being written. And for the first time in a long time, I am the one holding the pen.