For several years, Hope and I had this thing. Every night I was home, which was most nights, I would sit by her bed. We’d read. We’d pray. And then we’d do the oddest combination of hugs and kisses and knocks on the head and head bangs and two or three other things. We would do three of each of these things, and the list modified across time and simplified.

Every night for six or seven years.It seemed like we would do it forever. It seemed like we would remember all the elements forever.

Until the night she said, “Would it be okay if I put myself to bed?”

I knew it was coming, somehow. For an eleven-year-old girl, it was probably time.But it seemed important, it seemed like our link.

Six years later, we sit in a room with twenty other high school seniors and their parents and some faculty members and admissions staff. She’s in the front row, with the other students. We’re five rows back, fifteen chairs across the room. But I can see her clearly as a faculty member is talking about learning at this college, this place where she will likely be spending the next four years.

College won’t start for six months or so, but I’m still feeling a little meloncholy. The speaker is talking about an essay that the students read, an essay that Hope and I talked about. I had told her that the core of the essay was about motivation, about extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. She wondered what that was. I explained it, using an example she wasn’t happy about but which worked.

Suddenly, the speaker says it: “Extrinsic motivation.” The face I’m watching in profile, the face I have watched for 17 years, turns and looks right at me and smiles.

The ritual I had thought was our link, wasn’t. More accurately, it wasn’t one connection now lost. Instead, it was one link in a chain of experiences, routines, rituals, habits, each lasting for a time, all linked to form a connection that will be fine.

The secret isn’t to establish the one thing. The secret is to weave the many things into this connection which, while stretched and yelled at sometimes, is well surviving the transition from child to adolescent to young woman.

by Jon Swanson

Photo graciously provided by jon.swanson, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved