Shoulder to shoulder, the four of us stood on the field at Petco Park under the bright night lights, hair frizzing in the steamy San Diego air, screaming the words to Noah Kahan songs like our lives depended on it.

For months I’d been looking forward to this night: my college kid, about to be a third year (how is that even possible?), my younger daughter, a sophomore in high school, and my nephew, visiting from the Bay Area before starting his second year of college. Our little herd, all in one place.

Singing, hands up, light-up bracelets pulsing to the beat, my daughter’s hand squeezing mine, my nephew’s arm slung around the girls with that easy grin he’s had since he was three. I kept trying to do that thing where you hold onto a moment while you’re still inside it, which never actually works, but I tried anyway. I didn’t want it to end.

Kahan opened the show with his usual joke, something about being here to make us all miserable, and then proceeded to do the opposite: guitars, banjos, one kick-ass fiddler, and a stadium full of strangers who all seemed to know exactly why they’d come.

His new album is called The Great Divide, and if you know anything about my work, you know I couldn’t let that title just wash over me. I stood in that crowd, surrounded by kids at three completely different distances from home, and thought: well, there it is. That’s the whole thing, isn’t it?

My Own Divide

Here’s what I didn’t expect that night. I walked in expecting a magical evening I’d been looking forward to it for months. What I didn’t expect was to notice how much I’ve changed right alongside my kids.

The mom I was three years ago, the one for whom drop-off was still theoretical, some far-off thing to dread, isn’t the mom who stood on that field. I’ve done this now. I’ve had the empty bedroom, the too-quiet car, the first FaceTime call that was somehow both too short and exactly enough. Some days I don’t fully recognize her either, that earlier version of me who thought the hard part was the goodbye.

If you’re standing anywhere near this transition right now, whether it’s a senior counting down her last first-day-of-school, a freshman you dropped off three weeks ago, or a mom like me, watching your kid come home for a visit and realizing home now means something different to both of you, I want you to know this divide isn’t just happening to your kid. It’s happening to you too. You’re allowed to be in transition here, not just witnessing one. That divide isn’t only between you and your kid. It’s between who you were and who you’re becoming too.

The Divide Isn’t a Break. It’s a Distance

Watching my third-year college kid mouth every word next to my high school sophomore, who still has a couple years of “home” left, and feeling my own footing shift under me at the same time, this is what struck me: the divide Kahan sings about isn’t estrangement, it’s distance, the natural kind, the kind that opens up between who someone used to be and who they’re becoming.

That’s the reframe I want to hand you, whatever this season looks like in your house. The growing space between you and your kid isn’t proof something’s wrong. It’s proof something worked. You raised a person capable of walking toward their own life, and that means, some days, they walk a little further away from yours.

Letting go of a college kid was never supposed to feel like losing them. It’s supposed to feel like standing on a field, a little further from the stage than you used to be, watching someone you made walk into the rest of their own story.

Stick Season Was the Waiting. This Is the Crossing

If you’ve followed Kahan since Stick Season, you know that album lived in a suspended, aching, in-between place: the waiting, the not-yet, the dread of a season you can’t quite name. That’s senior year, honestly. All that anticipatory grief before anything has even happened yet, that low hum of “this is the last one” running under every ordinary Tuesday.

The Great Divide is what comes after. It’s the actual crossing. The commitment, the decision made, the dorm room scheduled and shopped for, and then the goodbye that somehow always arrives faster than you braced for.

If you’re still in your own stick season right now, dreading a goodbye that hasn’t happened yet, I want you to know this: it’s survivable. I promise. There’s something on the other side of the grief, the overwhelm, and the unfamiliar mom-mode you’re standing in right now.

Language for the Feeling I Couldn’t Name

Here’s the part I didn’t expect walking into that stadium: I’ve been trying to describe this exact ache to friends for two years, and Kahan just did it for me, in three minutes, with a full band behind him.

“Porch Light” got me thinking about my own porch light, small as it is outside our townhome, the one I still leave on some nights out of habit, even though the person it used to be lit for is 500 miles away now, even though we’re still in the same time zone.

And buried in the album’s full title, The Great Divide: The Last of the Bugs, there’s a hidden lyric: “you weren’t supposed to find this, only the last of the bugs ever do.” As a parent coach, that line landed on me like a job description. Noticing what you’re not technically supposed to notice, the shorter hug, the “love you” that sounds a little different now, that’s basically the work of this whole season of parenting.

That’s the gift of an album like this. It doesn’t hand you an answer. It hands you language. And once you have language for a feeling, you can finally set it down somewhere instead of carrying it around unnamed.

Singing It Out Loud, Together

That’s exactly what happened at Petco Park. Forty thousand of us singing the same aching lyric back at the stage, and it did something a quiet living room never could. It says: you are not the only one who feels this.

That’s what I want this post to be for you, wherever you’re reading it. Whether your kid is a senior counting down the months, a freshman you just dropped off, or somewhere in between the leaving and the launched, like mine, you don’t have to hold this alone in the quiet. Say it out loud. Find your people. Sing along, even off-key, even between tears streaming slowly down your check, smiling with joy, or your voice cracking on the chorus.

A Few Things to Tuck Into Your Heart

• This divide, this widening gap between you and your almost-grown kid means the roots you gave them are strong enough to let them roam.
• You’re allowed to grieve the ending and celebrate what’s next, in the same breath.Pride and heartbreak aren’t in competition here. They’re roommates.
• The silence Kahan sings about isn’t the end of the relationship. It’s a renegotiation of it. Different rhythm, different distance, still connected
• You don’t have to translate this feeling perfectly to be allowed to feel it. Sometimes a song, a stadium, or a stranger’s caption says it better than you can, and that’s not a failure of your own words. It’s relief! Borrow the language until yours catches up.
• You’re feel like you’re losing a version of yourself. And you’re allowed to grieve her and get curious about who’s replacing her.

Reflection Question: What’s one thing from this season, senior year, drop-off, that first quiet week after, that you’ve been holding alone, either about your kid or about yourself, that you could say out loud to someone this week?

Still in the Great Divide?

If you’re standing in your own version of that stadium crowd right now, full heart, aching a little, proud beyond words, I see you. I’m right there with you, not just as a parent coach but as a fellow mom in the thick of this transition myself, singing the same songs, missing the same person, in a different section of the same crowd.

You don’t have to figure out this crossing alone.

Take the first next step here

Cheering you on, and probably still hoarse from screaming “Downfall” at the top of my lungs. 🎶