Dear KidsOutAndAbout readers:
When Madison and Ella were young, I made it a point to stretch their comfort zones in small, manageable ways. They’d order their own food at restaurants, they'd arrange their own homeschool work schedules, they'd try activities where they didn’t know anyone. I did my best not to step in unless invited.
Over time, they started trusting their own ability to
navigate the world without me. That, of course, was the point. But the better they got at being independent, the more I started to feel a quiet kind of discomfort. They were moving outward—into the world, into themselves—and I could feel the shift.
There’s a concept in astrophysics called red shift. When a star or galaxy moves away from us, the light it emits stretches, shifting toward the red end of the spectrum. The farther away it moves, the redder the
light appears. It’s how we know the universe is expanding. The movement doesn’t mean the light is gone—just that it’s arriving to us in a new form, from farther away.
I think about that a lot as my kids are no longer orbiting so closely. I still see their light; it just looks different now. I’m learning to recognize their new wavelengths. The trick, I think, is not to see red shift as loss, but as evidence of motion. The fact that I feel the stretch means the universe is doing
what it’s supposed to do: expanding, evolving, moving outward. I remind myself that this kind of shift is a mark of success.
Increased wavelength, decreased frequency... it's all part of the natural order of things. Light travels and stretches, and love does, too.
—Debra Ross, publisher
