I was sitting in my car this week, stopped on the highway and awaiting a signal from the fellow with the sign that it would be safe to proceed when I was struck by a sense of deja-vu. I certainly had been in this same predicament before. In fact, only last week I was stuck in almost the same place waiting for the same signal from a different man. It was then that I realized the incongruity set inside this congruent action.

You see, the last time I waited it was for the highway painters to finish their business. This time I was waiting for the highway pavers to finish theirs.

Now wait just a minute!

Waiting, I wondered if anyone else was aware of the discrepancy in logical progression that was being played out before us. Surely someone in the Highway Department is spending too much time waiting for retirement and too little time attending to what is causing the rest of us to wait out here on the highway.

A waiting of a more beneficial kind has also filled my week as my wife and I have prepared ourselves for the culmination of a certain part of our parental responsibilities.

Our middle child is off to college.

Ensconcing our precious commodity into her dorm room was an exercise in manual deployment and emotional exhaustion. I spent as much time handing Kleenex to the child's mother as I did dragging boxes of clothes in from the car.

But waiting to catch my breath provided an opportunity to ponder the reason for these poignant tears.

Although we are certainly not experts on parenting, we are parents to three and have discovered, most often through that wonderful instructional process called trial and error, that this vocation has been the most meaningful of all. It is not without its heartache to be sure but the rewards have so overwhelmed their opposites as to make them non-existent.

At least, that is what you feel while waiting to make one more clothes-laden trek up the stairs.

You also feel a deep sense of gratitude for having had the privilege of knowing one human being so very well. From the moment she appeared out of the mystery of her mother to this moment of one more transition, the utter wonder of a shared life is overwhelming.

It does cause one to, well...pause.

We worry, of course, about her future. There was always a sense, perhaps imagined, that we could protect her as long as she lived here with us. But now that protection, imagined or not, is in the hands of others. Charles Dickens once wrote, "In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice." Waiting for the inevitable acts of injustice is the most painful of waitings.

We worry and, for now, we weep as well. Our tears reflect that mixture of joy and sorrow, worry and relief, excitement and dread that make up all our lives. We hope that our efforts over the years as parents have been received as the gifts they were intended to be, but we also know some gifts will never be opened, and others will have to be set aside unused as she discovers where she is going, and what gifts from us she wants to take along with her.

Of course, for now, we can only wait.