I think I finally got this parenting thing figured out. The kid fights his or her whole childhood for independence, and the parent struggles his or her whole parenthood learning to let go. Learning this only took me 51 years of life and 18 years of parenting!

My wife Susan learned faster than I. Although she didn’t have any choice, she was the first to let got when Meredith, our daughter, left the womb. I was embarrassing myself at the time by proclaiming, proudly, "It’s a boy!" I was looking at the umbilical cord.

Susan took the next step in letting go when we weaned Meredith from breast feeding. This just gave me more opportunity to bond. I thought I had total control. I could hold her head in my hand, balance the rest of her body on my arm, and her feet would barely reach my elbow. I wasn’t about to let go, but I didn’t realize then how much she would struggle to get free.

I didn’t have a clue from the beginning. Before Meredith was born, I bragged to my neighbor that "the baby’s not going to control our lives, we’re going to control hers." Yeah, right! My idea of control went out the window upon the first night home. At 2:00 a.m. Susan and I each had different baby books in hand trying to figure out how to heat formula and fill a bottle. We had only one small sample donated by the hospital upon our departure. A liner, reminding me of a sandwich bag, went inside the bottle, the formula inside the liner. But on that night, the liner collapsed when we poured the formula, and the contents, like a flush down a toilet, went over the kitchen floor. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, we had lost control from the beginning.

I failed to recognize the obvious signs of Meredith’s fight for independence beginning in early childhood. She tried first to roll away, then crawl away, and eventually walk away from us. In fact, when first walking she would get angry if we took her hands. Shouting "no", she would yank her hands away, shaking them with anger, and give us a disgusted look that was a precursor to what she as an adolescent would give us continuously.

I enjoyed being a father during her pre-adolescence. To her (believe it or not) I was tall (hard to believe! But her viewpoint was from only 3 feet), I was strong (I could open a mayonnaise jar with my hands!), I was smart (but who can’t out-smart a pre-teen), I was fast (longer legs are an advantage), I was tough (I rarely cried). In her eyes for this all too brief of a period, I could almost do no wrong — she placed me on a pedestal.

Then about age 11 the hormones started to flow. Hers, not mine! They plus reality knocked me off the pedestal. In her eyes, I was no longer so tall, no longer so strong, no longer so fast, no longer so tough. She was recognizing me for what I am – a human being with human frailties (which, of course, she was and still is quick to point out to me). Chuck Waterman once described this period as "the wonder years" – because you "wonder" why you had them. Although it took me a decade longer than Susan, I was beginning to learn to let go.

High school is a challenging time for any parent. A parent’s biggest fear is peer pressure. Again being a slow learner, I tried to encourage certain friendships and discourage others. Thank goodness she made her own choices because two of the friends I tried to encouraged dropped out of school – one to be a mother and the other to be incarcerated.

I tried to encourage an interest in music, but she didn’t want to be a "band nerd" like her father and chose athletics. I tried to involve her in my running and biking, but she chose swimming which she knew I hated being wet and cold. I tried to encourage her studying engineering, but she thinks she’d like to be a stock analyst. I chose to send her to the Columbus School for Girls, but she is choosing a college on the basis of finding a 10:1 ratio of boys-to-girls. Like Bill Clinton, I spent my college days avoiding the military, and she has chosen to go the Air Force Academy.

Even I eventually learned that a child must make her own decisions and pursue her own interests, learn from her own mistakes and take pride in her own accomplishments. The most that parent can do is to give the core values, and successful parenting is then trusting your child to be guided by those values as she makes her own decisions and pursues her own interests. I just hope her own mistakes aren’t too costly, but they will be her choices.

Talk about not letting go – I can still feel myself tensely gripping the passenger door handle of our family Jeep as I watched the mail boxes close in on the windshield as Meredith was first learning to drive. The mail boxes resembled my life passing before my eyes. This is the time when parents learn to stifle the natural urge to scream, and instead close their eyes and pray that the mail boxes and oncoming cars are not as close as they look. No one has much control in the passenger seat, so you have to let go, even if it is only of the door handle.

Susan and I learned the first night that a driver’s license opens perhaps the biggest right of passage toward independence. Meredith’s first passage with her driver’s license was to take a car full of friends out after a swim meet. She was to have returned home by 10:30. Without calling (something she continuously had a problem remembering to do), she didn’t actually return until a little after midnight when she came driving in as high as a kite. Well, we had to bring her back down to the ground. Core values are fine, but at times parents need to impose some rules.

Well, she’s now graduated from high school. For the past year she has been distancing herself from both her home and parents. She is now beginning to pack her things to leave by the end of June. It has taken me this long to figure out that she has spent her whole childhood preparing to leave. And it has taken me my whole parenthood to learn to let go. Knowing that, however, doesn’t make letting go any easier to do.