19. Letting You Go

 Jason Isbell is back again and this time with a song for the dads. Letting go of anything is never easy, be it vices, relationships, one time friends or habits. Surely few things can be harder than letting your kids grow and fail and thrive on their own.  Isbell tackled that subject and when he was through he came out with what will surely be the Father Daughter dance at countless weddings in the future. It will be for me and one or both my daughters.  It is a perfect reflection of the love of a father for his little girl/s.   

I have often told this story before, but figure here is a good time to tell it again.  Each time my wife was pregnant I said, "I would stop worrying after we saw the heartbeat on the ultrasound." Well, that came and went and the worry stayed. "I will be fine after they look like more than a Christmas light." Wrong. The worry stayed. "I will be fine after they are born." Nope. Try again. The worry stayed. "I will be fine when they can roll over." Ha. The worry stayed. "I will be fine when they can tell us what is wrong." Wrong again. The worry stayed. Eventually I came to the reality that it is only natural and actually quite easy to worry about my kids from the first flicker of that heartbeat until the last flicker of mine occurs (hopefully many decades from now). The easy part is to worry and the hard part is letting them grow and eventually go. 

This song captures what I have experienced and will hopefully continue to experience as my girls grow into women and hopefully find the love of someone that makes them happy to wake up. Someone that inspires them to be better people.  Someone that recognizes them for the amazingly beautiful souls that they are and loves them like my wife and I have loved them from the first flicker to the end of of the line. When they find that person and that day comes I won't worry anymore, right?

#jasonisbell #lettingyougo #dadanddaugthers #slowdown