I Couldn’t Fix It. So I Had to Trust It.

What a forty-five minute goodbye taught me about trusting a decision I couldn’t check on yet.

Photo credit: Author from Hoboken, NJ, looking out on Manhattan over July 4th weekend.

This July 4th evening, instead of fireworks, we lost power twice. The first time, it came back in fifteen minutes, and we barely noticed. The second time, it didn’t come back at all.

The family was already in bed, and the house had gone completely silent in the way a house only gets quiet when the hum of every appliance stops at once. It was getting hotter by the minute.

Every window shut against the storm outside. I lay there doing what I always do at night when I’m anxious, running through my worries for the next day: my husband too unwell to help in the morning, my son’s bags still not fully packed, the drive to campus ahead of us, and underneath all of it, a low current of fear that none of us would sleep well enough to be ready for the day we actually needed.

We slept more than I expected. But I woke up already anxious, and the morning confirmed why. My husband couldn’t come. So it was on me: the last of the packing, somehow still unfinished despite days of trying to get ahead of it, and then getting my son to a program that was, in every practical sense, going to be fine.

The drive itself was easy. No traffic. We got there early, which I thought was a gift. We finished unpacking at noon. His program didn’t start until one. We had time to leisurely walk across campus and sit together in the student center, where he’d eventually have lunch.

Except the extra time didn’t end up being a gift. It became a gap.

My son, who does not get anxious, who has spent years being the one who tells me Mom, I’ll be fine, sat in that gap, and with each passing minute, I could see his struggle grow, right in front of me. Not dramatically. Just a deeper slouch, a receding and blinking, watering eyes.

He didn’t know anyone yet. It was too early, and the room was too quiet. None of the energy and machinations of a pending event had started.

I watched and understood, the way you understand something in your body before your mind catches up, that my staying there was making it worse, not better. He told me as much. Mom, you can go. Which is a strange thing to hear from your child. An offer of mercy, or maybe a soft plea to go before my presence drew out more of the emotions he was trying to keep in check.

As I walked away and saw him attempt to marshal his feelings, I repeated to myself why this experience would help him grow, was a wonderful opportunity to explore, and an important step in his development. But even as I ran through my logic, all I felt was guilt that I was asking my child to suffer, fear that maybe I didn’t know what was best, and concern that maybe I was even doing harm.

Before we left, I found a program coordinator. Told her he wasn’t feeling great. Asked if he’d be introduced to the other kids, if someone would notice if he needed a hand. She told me it would be fine. The afternoon would offer lots of activities. It would be great. All things I already knew. I needed to hear them out loud anyway.

Then I left. My daughter was with me, quiet in the back seat, and within a few minutes on the road, my phone started lighting up. It was my son.

He wasn’t feeling well. He was worried. He said so outright, which he never does. I called him from the car, my daughter listening to every word, and I told him the only thing I could: that it was going to be okay, that I wouldn’t force him to navigate these feelings alone, that he could call me the second he needed to, and I would figure out what to do next, even if there was a cost. I said for him, but I think I needed to say the words to myself.

At some point during that call, I glanced at my daughter and saw she was tearing up. Silently, the way she does. She’s an empath, like I am, and she’d been absorbing it all, her brother’s growing worry moving straight into her own body without either of them saying a word to each other.

I was doing my best to get us home safely through a storm that had followed us from the campus. The rain and wind were a mirror of what I was feeling inside, holding my son’s fear on the phone and my daughter’s grief in the backseat. And underneath both of those, my own version of the same feeling, masked as composure because someone in that car needed to drive.

We got home. I got my daughter lunch, dropped her at a friend’s house, and came back to a house that still didn’t have power, hours after the outage, the food in the fridge starting to turn, and the air thick with the kind of heat that makes your brain turn to molasses while your heart starts to ruminate.

And then, nothing. No text. No call.

I’d braced for a flood of updates and instead got silence, which is its own particular kind of hard. I didn’t check in. I wanted to, more than once. But checking in would have meant not trusting the thing I’d told him in the car, and I’d meant it when I said it.

So instead, I did the only thing I actually had control over: I focused on me and what I needed. I finished a workout I’d promised myself, moved through my own afternoon, and let the not knowing sit there without trying to manage it.

By evening, his text came. The afternoon hadn’t been so bad after all. Dinner was not great, but OK. He was still there and more open to staying. The next morning, he told me he’d slept well, and that he was willing to stay the first week, evaluate from there, see how it went.

I felt the whole thing let go at once, the way your shoulders drop half an inch without you noticing they’d been up near your ears all day.

Relief washed over me. There was still an ache that hadn’t fully gone by the next morning, the kind that doesn’t come from any one hard moment but from holding several at once and not putting any of them down.

I didn’t have a way to fix the forty-five minutes at the student center. I couldn’t shorten the wait, or the silence after, or make the outcome arrive any faster than it was going to. All I had was a decision, made months ago, tested in a student center and in a parking lot with my daughter watching, and the discipline to leave it alone once I’d made it.

That’s a harder skill than it sounds like. Most of us are trained to keep managing, keep checking, keep intervening until we have proof we did it right. But some of the most important calls you’ll make, as a parent or a leader or anyone responsible for someone else’s hard day, don’t come with proof. Just the decision, and the waiting, and whatever you’re able to trust while you wait.

I’d love to hear about a time when you had to make a call and then simply live with not knowing, at least for a while, whether it was the right one. Share it in the comments below. It might just help someone navigate a similar situation. Whatever you’re holding right now, I hope you find a way to trust it.

May you lead without limits,