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I've been practicing for months. Practicing what it will be like when, in a few weeks, my firstborn is packed up, flown off and settled into a dorm on a campus on a hill in a town some 1,000 miles from the old house where his stirrings have been the backbeat to my every day.

Just to see what it feels like, I find myself walking past the bedroom that's hard off the landing on the way up the stairs. I peek in, see the bedclothes unrumpled, just the way he left them.

Sometimes, if I'm drawn in, I take a few steps beyond the door, look around, breathe deep of what it will be like -- when the piles on the desk no longer teeter, when the soggy towels aren't plopped on the floor, when, for months at a time, there's no trace of him in our midst.

My firstborn is headed off to college.

And while, for the life of me, I cannot picture this place without him, I know deep down that the whole point of this exercise called parenting is this soon-to-come parting, no matter how hard.

While I might be practicing this new long-distance mothering -- imagining what it'll be like to not see the light shining from under his door at 3 in the morning, to not hear his books thump on the counter when he lopes into the house, to not wake at 5 to stir his oatmeal and send him off with a hug -- and while I can't even begin to imagine how it will feel to look into his eyes one last time and walk away there on that leafy New England college quad, I do know that the real work started long ago -- and for that there was no practice, only sheer trial by error and hope.

For the last 18-plus years, I've been getting him ready for this great divide.

I was cradling that lanky baby in my arms, back in our city garden one hot Sunday afternoon, when a wise friend of ours, a priest actually, stood in front of a circle of people we love and told my husband and me that we had but one essential job: to give that child roots and wings.

Roots, so he is forever grounded, solid, deep. Wings, so that some day the wind will catch beneath him, and he will soar.

Roots, I've come to learn, are laid down slowly. They're laid down late at night in kitchens, when the tears come, and the stories from the playground break your heart, but you stand there like a sponge, soaking up every drop of the hurt.

They're laid down on long walks where you listen to the boy spill his dreams, and you let out his kite string; you say you believe, and you mean it.

They're laid down after school at the kitchen counter, while you sop up the dramas of the day, listen to the questions and quandaries, and offer up the scant teaspoons of wisdom you have to offer.

They're laid down so when you get to this summer -- when your kid packs up, leaves home, steps into the college life for which he is so very hungry -- you can stand back and watch what happens.

What you pray for is that while you've been hard at work cultivating those roots, the wings, undetected, began to unfurl.

Oh, sure, you've seen starter flights. The road trip in a car packed with 18-year-olds where you stayed home and held your breath. The lightning storm that hit when he was out on a boat in a river, and somehow he made it back to shore and holed up in a metal boxcar used as a boathouse.

But, so far, the nest he has flown home to was yours, the one you've watched with vigilant eyes.

From here on in, the wings and the flights are all his.

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(c) 2011, Chicago Tribune.

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