Letting Go — Phoebe Leaves for Paris (Dispatch 10)

About this episode

Tonight, Phoebe is sleeping in her childhood bedroom for the last time. Tomorrow she boards a flight to Paris, where she's starting college six thousand miles from the house she grew up in.

In this episode, Jeff walks through Phoebe's final night at home: cooking dinner together one more time, scrawling Buddhist maxims onto sticky notes for her nightstand, and quoting T.S. Eliot on beginnings and endings while she packs in the next room. He traces what it actually feels like to practice non-attachment when it stops being a concept from a book and starts being your own daughter leaving for good — and why the same lesson about breath and letting go that he learned the night she was born, eighteen years ago, turns out to be the hardest one to relearn now.

This is the tenth episode of Diaries of a Dance Dad, an audio memoir series in Jeff's own words. It spans the full arc of parenthood: the inhale of birth and early chaos, the grind of no sleep and travel with kids, the gut-punches of failure, and the slow exhale of letting go.

Order Diaries of a Dance Dad audiobook & hear the tales that bookend my paternal journey from cradle to empty nestdom at onecommune.com/dancedad.

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