Our Oldest Leaves for Her Gap Year
My husband and I agreed early on that we wanted our children to take a gap year before college. For me, that year was an incredibly enriching experience after working so hard throughout high school. I explored multiple countries in the Middle East, learned to navigate another country in a language I did not speak fluently and had the freedom to figure out what interested me outside the structure of high school.
It was during that year that I discovered my love of Talmud. I eventually made it one of my majors in college. My gap year did not simply give me a break before college. It helped shape what I chose to study and, in many ways, who I became.
So the idea of our children taking a gap year has never felt particularly unusual to us. It was something we believed in long before we had a child old enough to apply for one.
Actually navigating the process with our oldest was another matter entirely.
The process was very different from what I had experienced, and I had no clue what to expect. Our school does not have the same resources for navigating gap-year applications and acceptances that some other religious schools have. The entire process was intense.
I am incredibly grateful for the friends who shared the insider scoop and for the Facebook group dedicated to these questions. There were so many things I would not have known to ask and parts of the process I would not have understood without parents who had already been through it.
That experience probably deserves its own post, once I have enough distance to explain what happened and what I wish I had known. Tonight, though, the applications, acceptances and decisions are behind us. Tomorrow she actually leaves.
We have spent the last several months preparing her in ways both large and extremely mundane. We have worked on managing finances, making sure she has the apps she will need in another country and talking about what it means to be responsible for things that have largely been handled within the structure of our household.
There is always one more thing you suddenly realize you may not have taught.
I have been thinking a lot about adulting and the difference between knowing how to do something and being the person responsible for remembering that it needs to be done. It is one thing to understand how money works. It is another to manage your own spending. It is one thing to have the right app. It is another to figure out what to do when the app does not work and your parents are in another country.
I know we have not covered every possible situation. We could not. Part of the reason for taking this year is for her to learn how to navigate some of those situations herself, just as I did.
Her departure will also change the dynamics of our household in very practical ways. I have relied on my oldest to do a significant amount of the driving, and all of that is about to fall back to me.
Only six and a half more months until Child #2 can get her license. Not that I am counting.
But the larger change is not really about the driving.
Until now, the relationships among the four siblings have largely existed within the shared structure of our family. They live in the same house. They see one another without having to arrange it. Even when they communicate through technology, everyone is still part of the same daily orbit.
Now my oldest will need to build and maintain an individual relationship with each of her siblings from a distance. That relationship will look different with each one because their access to phones and other technology is different, but also because their personalities are different. What helps one sibling feel connected may not work for another.
I think that is one of the parts of leaving home that we talk about less. The child who leaves does not only develop a different relationship with her parents. She has to figure out what it means to be a sister when being a sister is no longer built into every day.
And the younger three will each have to figure out what it means for them, too.
Tomorrow, we will take her where she needs to go, make sure she has what she needs and say goodbye. Then we will come home to a household that is almost the same as it was before, but not quite.
This is a transition we chose. It is one we have encouraged for years because we believe in the growth, independence and opportunity that can come from it. I am excited for what she will learn and who she will become during this year.
I also know that believing your child should leave home for a year does not make it easy when tomorrow finally arrives.
