This morning I sent my six-year-old son off to school in tears because he was scared to go on his class field trip without me as a chaperon. My heart ached all day thinking about him, worrying about him, hoping he was happy at that moment. This is a scene we've lived through many times in his short life. He's a sensitive little guy with a heart so tender I can't help but want to shield him from the blows of this world. But I know he needs to start standing on his own two feet and finding strength from inside himself rather than from me or the favorite blanket he still clings to at home.

Talking with a friend today about her one-month-old baby, I realized that during all those oh-so-incredibly-long nights when I felt I was the only one awake with one of my own babies, the link between me and my child was tightening and strengthening. What my friend doesn't know is that while parenting will get a lot easier as her daughter grows up and sleeps through the night, in other ways it's going to get so much harder. It's torture to hold a crying infant and not know how to calm her screams and it's still torture when she's older and feeling pain from the world that she'll be able to do nothing about.

My sister's oldest is graduating from high school this weekend. For weeks, months even, she thought she was doing just fine, taking his leaving in stride. But today, when someone asked her how she feels about her baby graduating and moving away, she realized that this very morning she made his last school lunch…and she burst into tears.

Parenting is like that, I guess. Just when you become strong in one area, like comforting an infant or sending a kid off on a new school adventure, a new stage comes along to take your feet out from under you.

Will it ever ease? When my kids are adults living on their own, will this tug in my heart that connects me to them and their pain ever go away?

In one aspect, I hope so. In another, I never want it to go away no matter how painful it is – because having that connection is the greatest thing in the world.