My Thoughts As You Head Back to School

A poem about parenting young adults, helped along by some advice from Billy Collins

This week’s poem started with the very last stanza. That was all I had for a very long time. Then this week my kids both headed back to their universities, and I read this great piece by

Meagan Francis

about parenting young adults in which she says, “A healthy distance, without detachment, is my parenting North Star in this strange season.”

Francis’s thoughts on the difference between distance and detachment were a very helpful read as I said goodbye to my children after a lengthy winter break. It’s lovely to have them home, hard to watch them leave, and it’s what’s supposed to happen right now, for all of us. Yet it doesn’t mean we stop being a family, stop helping one another.

So I went back to that little note I’d scratched about lions and fires and came up with the poem below. I love it when that happens, when the universe taps me on the shoulder and reminds me of a thought from long ago that might be of use. Substack has a way of throwing just the right thing in my path to help that happen.

It also has a way sucking up my free time. So this week, in addition to bidding farewell to my kids, I’ve also said goodbye to the Substack app on my phone. First I tried just hiding it, but I still saw the notifications and it was too easy to find myself right back in Notes, scrolling, scrolling. So I’ve deleted the app, and I’m fiddling with email settings to make my phone a No Substack Zone. I’m also limiting my time on Notes when at my computer. Feels like a really positive change.

One more quick note about the poem below. When I first started writing it I was talking about my kids, and it wasn’t working. Then I remembered my Zoom call with Billy Collins and how he talked about keeping extra people out of his poems. That’s when I realized that my poem was too crowded. There was me, my audience, and my kids. So I reframed it with my children as the audience, speaking directly to them, and the whole thing started to come together.

---

My Thoughts as You Head Back to School

Your bags are packed
I’ve stowed them in the car
while you take one last 
look around, just to be sure

And as I wait for you
by the door 
I wonder -

I know you will laugh at this, 
and tell me I think 
too hard about these things

- but do you suppose
when we first came down
from the trees and lived 
on the savannah
that parents washed 
their hands of children 
at some arbitrary age

Did they say now you must
live over there, pointing
at some distant spot beyond
the glow of the flames

I think of these things 
when you go and the world 
says I mustn’t help you too much

Sink or swim, they say
Which is nonsense
Who watches someone
sink below the waves
and doesn’t jump in to help

There’s a reason we live in groups 
There is safety there, 
and it’s easier to build shelter
with many hands

You’ll roll your eyes
and tell me I’m being dramatic
But the most terrible myth 
we tell ourselves is the one
about independence,
the one that says strength
comes from solitude

It is not weakness 
to ask for help
and it is not wrong to give it

I’ll concede we’ve made 
great strides as a species 
since our first decent
to the forest floor

Vaccines are grand, 
as are wool socks
I’m not at all certain
about the need for so many 
kinds of toothpaste,
but dentists are a very good thing

Yet all this cultish insistence
on self-reliance 
has diminished the greatest
strength of our
hominid ancestors

When has any one of us
ever actually done it alone

So let’s agree, you and I,
to not let any of this 
fairy tale individualism
keep us from doing 
what we’ve always done

You make the fire, 
I'll watch for lions
And we'll both live
to see another sunrise

---

I’m getting very excited for the February Poetry Adventure, aren’t you?

February Poetry Adventure 2025

I’m happy to report that the Public Domain Poetry Project is off to a great start. If you’d like to see what people are sharing in the comments, here’s a link to this week’s post. We’re having a a lot of fun with the lines from “Travel,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. We’re talking about “poem attempts” as less scary to share than Poems with a Capital P, and the scourge of adverbs. Why not join us?

Week One

Thanks for reading, everyone!