prepare the kid, not the path

Elizabeth’s episode went out a bit late this time, and she’s taking the W anyway — one late episode in an entire year of hitting deadlines is a stat she’ll happily brag about.

The actual holdup: a minor kerfuffle around her youngest’s actual travel day as they departed for their grand European tour — nothing dramatic, just first-time-flying-solo stuff.

That’s separate from the real saga, which happened weeks earlier: the kid’s travel plan vibes were sitting at “fully handled, no parental input needed” right up until a month before departure, when it became very clear nothing had actually been booked.

What followed was a month of herding, book recommendations from Elliott Bay (RIP to the many tabs her kid definitely wasn’t going to read), and a crash course in mail holds and credit card limits — all while Elizabeth tried not to full-send into Overbearing Mom mode or as her kid’s call it “Beverly Goldberging”.

The trip got booked. The kid departed.

Elizabeth, with an unplanned trip to Seattle to make a connection also got a very nice day in Seattle and a stay at the Edgewater Hotel instead, which is a fine trade honestly.

Then the real spiral started: an old therapist line about preparing the child for the path, not the path for the child, which Elizabeth has treated as parenting scripture for twenty years — until this trip had her convinced she’d failed the assignment completely.

Cue a few days of quietly panicking that she’d somehow raised a kid who couldn’t function without her. She eventually lands somewhere more honest: her kid was fine, just inexperienced, because nobody’s born knowing what a packing cube is.

And also — some of that “overreach” wasn’t failure, it was just a mom who’d stab a b***h for her kids and isn’t sorry about it.

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