Sylas, our oldest child, is home for fall break after being away to college since August.  We’ve been anticipating having him home again and looking forward to seeing him and hearing about his experiences at Valpo University.

We’ve, (OK, “I’ve”) intentionally left his room intact so that when he comes home, he has his own bedroom to return to and his own bed to sleep in. Charles wanted to use Sylas’s bed to stage the master bedroom of the house we’re flipping.

“Absolutely not!”, I declared.  Sylas has to have his own bed to sleep in when he comes home, I reasoned. I’d sooner buy a bed to stage the flip house than to take Sylas’s bed!

Working with college students myself, I’ve heard enough stories of kids who return home to find their bedroom taken over by a sibling, turned into a guest room, or workout room. From the intensity of those conversations, I can tell you most kids don’t love that.

So, last week, we discovered stink bugs in Sylas’s room.  Turns out that he left his bedroom window open just a crack and with no screen in, the stink bugs came crawling in.  And not just a few.  You could say, a few hundred. And every day since then we’ve continued to rid the room of more stink bugs.  Every time we think we’ve got all of them, once and for all, we find more.

Stink Bug Invasion Helps Me To Let Go Of Ideals

Sylas came home Wednesday evening, the start of Fall Break, and found out that we were still battling stink bugs in his room.  In fact, by this time they are in every nook and cranny of our house.  He refused to sleep in his room. (You have to sleep in your room, I thought. That’s just the way it’s meant to be!).  Instead, he chose to sleep in the stink bug-free basement, in spite of the fact that we have a mole on the loose in the basement.  Yes, true story. How could so many creepy things happen all at once?

I had lovingly changed the sheets, motherly-like tidied up his bedroom and made things all ready for Sylas’s first weekend home from college. With a smile on my face, I stood in his readied room and imagined what it would be like to have him home, sleeping in his own bed again, just like he did for 18 years.  Back where he belonged if only for a few days, I told myself.

It was all going to be perfect, but then the stink bug invasion happened. And a mole made the basement, where Sylas slept, a home.  Not even close to how I had imagined it all to be.

Learning To Let Go Is Complex

As anyone who has sent a kid off to college or elsewhere knows, the process of learning to let go is complex. The letting go comes in waves and layers that when peeled back reveal the ways that I still am holding on.  Just when I think I’ve let go as much as I possibly can, the stink bugs invade and show me that I have more letting go to do. This time, for whatever reason, I’m to let go of my ideals about how things should be when Sylas returns home. My ideal was to have him come home, sleep in his own bed, and have his own cozy, comfortable space for a weekend. Probably deeper than that, though, was the desire for him to have a “there’s no place like home” kind of experience after being away for 8 weeks.  For crying out loud, it comes down to this: I want him to want to be home, and don’t want anything to interfere with that!  Yep, I have more letting go to do.

Sylas has ended up rolling with the stink bug invasion.  He’s fine with sleeping in the basement with the mole.  Me, I’m still learning to let go.