Last weekend I had to take A for his accepted student college visit. While we were waiting to get him settled with some temporary roommates for the weekend, he hit me with a request to do some traveling with friends this summer.

I wish I had captured the surprised look on his face when I indicated that I would need more details, but it was something I was willing to consider.

I could tell he expected a flat out no and had no idea what to say next.

The irony that I was about to drop him off with a group of strangers in a strange city, get back in my car and leave him for two days and we hadn’t thought twice about it was lost on him.

He was also unaware that it took every fiber of my being to answer in the slightly affirmative, rather than a resounding negative. Being separated for the next few days gave both of us a chance to re-evaluate the situation and the long ride home gave us plenty of time to have an adult discussion about it.

Because that’s what I’m on the verge of dealing with: parenting an “adult child.” A will be 18 next month, and while I’m not about to cut him off and demand he become independent overnight, our relationship is going to change.

I’ve been thinking a lot about similar conversations that I had with my dad when he was driving me back and forth to school. Quite possibly one of the most impactful statements that he ever made was what he told me as I was embarking on my own semi-adult journey. “I have to trust that I’ve done my job as a parent these last 18 years and prepared you for this.”

My dad also made sure I knew that no matter what, I could always phone home. “Just don’t ask me to bail you out of jail or identify you at the morgue” were his two caveats.

I want to be able to send A off into the world with the same confidence that my dad had in his parenting abilities, but like most things these days, I’m no longer confident in much.

I find myself telling him to think about what Dad would tell him to do whenever he hits me with something I’m not quite prepared to handle, and reassuring him that if things go south, we’ll just have to figure out how to fix it later.

One of my dad’s other favorite famous quotes was “Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment.”

He was a firm believer that sometimes lessons are best learned the hard way. Steve and I were definitely on the same page when it came to this philosophy, and frequently reminded each other not to make things easy for the kids.

However, after Steve died, I know I’ve felt that life has been difficult enough for them, and where possible, I’ve tried to relieve some of the burdens for them when I could.

When I got home from our quick weekend trip to find that the other two had left all the dishes from the weekend piled up in the sink, I reminded myself that there was relieving their burdens and then there was letting them be lazy. It’s a very hard line to walk sometimes.

Back to A’s impending adulthood. Although he’s got graduation coming up, and college in the Fall, he really hadn’t been thinking in terms of what turning 18 really means for him.

On the other hand, since I’ve been working on transitioning his health care from me to him and trying to make sure that I dot the I’s and cross the T’s so that I can continue to access all of his care information, I’ve been all too aware that although not much will change between us, legally there are a lot of ramifications.

While it is tempting to lay down the law, a “my house, my rules,” or “as long as I’m paying your bills” sort of situation, I don’t think that’s going to be the best way to approach this era of our lives.

Right now, I feel like I’m leaning toward a “trust you until you give me a reason not to” sort of approach. A has been a great kid, he’s done a stellar job with school, sports, and extracurriculars, he’s held a summer job since he was fourteen, and paid a lot of his own way.

While I’ve tried hard not to put “man of the house” responsibilities on his shoulders, he has by default picked up a few of them. I don’t have any reason to suspect that he will not be able to handle the rest responsibilities that come along with the independence he’s facing.

I’m all too conscious of the hole that is going to be in our family unit when he leaves in the Fall, even though it’s just a temporary leave, and I’m sure we will text, email, and chat regularly. We had a preview of what that’s going to look like when he was away at a state competition for a few days last week.

I think all of us are a little unnerved when one of us is missing from our family unit for any amount of time, so it’s going to take some time to get used to it. I also suspect that unlike me, A will probably not return home when he graduates from college.

He is determined to continue with his schooling at the graduate level, for one thing, but for another, I can already see his wings spreading beyond the confines of our small community. The best I can hope for is that he knows he always has a safe landing pad here whenever he needs it.

So, I have to listen to the wise words of my dad, and trust that I’ve done my job, and Steve did his while he was here, and turn him loose. I’m not sure if that’s good judgment on my part, or bad, but either way, A is getting ready to have the experiences of his lifetime and that’s something we can both be excited about.

Liz Pinkey writes a column every Saturday in the Times News.