Another major milestone in the Snyder household this week.  My oldest daughter just turned twenty-one years old.  I know – it’s hard to believe – and a little shocking to say.  Not to wax nostalgic, but it really doesn’t seem like all that long ago when the hospital in Florida let us go home with her – a tiny infant that would totally rely on us for her future existence.  My wife and I looked at each other with fear and trepidation.  Who in their right mind would let us have a baby to take care of?  We knew nothing – and we felt like it.

As it happens for all first-time parents, one finds their footing and before long, baby becomes toddler, toddler becomes daughter off to kindergarten, middle school, high school, and soon – that smiling little girl is finishing up her college undergraduate degree.  Life brings high and low points, and all of those experiences, lessons, and instruction help to shape the worldview of a human being in our charge.  Make no mistake, kids look to the adults around them for examples of how to act and how to treat people, and I can only hope that we have provided some passable examples along the way. 

I’d like to think we raised some independent, free-thinking young women.  After all, that’s the goal, isn’t it?  I have two daughters (the younger sibling is eighteen), and they both have their own personalities, are off in college making their own decisions, and plotting out the course of their own lives.  It’s an exciting time for both of them, and bittersweet for their mother and me.  Honestly, the house seems empty without them.

Does that mean that we stop being parents?  Absolutely not.  Both of my girls are comfortable enough to contact us by phone or email on a regular basis.  I usually get the “nuts and bolts” questions about the physical world, handling questions on finances, technology, current events, and the like.  My wife gets the other calls, where they vent about classes, friends, romance, and all things in the emotional spectrum.  We each do our part, calmly talk anxious voices back from the cliff’s edge, and most of the time – we just listen.  The girls know what they need or want to do, but sometimes – they just want to say it out loud to someone who will hear them.

We’ll always be there for that – no matter what.