Don't Grow Away

Song story & origins

Introduction

Don’t Grow Away appears on Letting the Sunlight Back In (2010), but I actually wrote it around 1990 during our first stint living and working at a youth camp in New Mexico. Our first child, Megan (born in 1989), was with us that summer—tiny and endlessly social in a world of hundreds of people, songs, and campfires. We hiked constantly with her in a backpack carrier. One morning, in our little cabin, I watched her sleep and then wake, and the feeling of being a new father—of the whole world turning new—poured straight into this song. Decades later, as I revisited the lyric, Megan was expecting her first child. The circle keeps widening.

Where the song came from

The title is a play on words: I want a child to grow, to keep changing like a river on its way—and also never to grow away from us. New parenthood rearranged everything. I’d seen a thousand dawns, but with her in my arms, every sunrise was different. Parents describe that shift as wearing your heart outside your body, or growing a new set of eyes. That’s the core of the song.

The second verse names what I knew we couldn’t spare her: pleasure and pain both belong to a full life—the burning ache of friendship and the gentle kiss of rain. There’s a plea embedded there: before you see the truth unmasked, look into my eyes. I don’t want to hold you back from learning, but if trust can save you some needless hurt, let me try.

A life it traveled through

We spent the summers of 1990–91 at that camp (I worked as assistant director; Sheryl ran crafts), and this became our duet. We sang it in libraries, coffee houses, even a class reunion—any place people gathered with their stories. Years later, when Megan married (2010), she chose this as the song to walk down the aisle to. By then I’d been listening to a lot of Jack Johnson, and the recorded version leans into that laid-back guitar feel—different from how I played it back in 1990, but it fit the tenderness of the moment. Sheryl’s harmony on the record is part of why that version still feels like family to me.

More recently, both our daughters moved back to town, and I’m grateful for that closeness. I also carry friends’ stories where distance opened up between parent and child without any single cause to point to. The song’s refrain holds my hope for them too: keep growing, but don’t grow away—and for parents, the hard practice of letting go in ways that don’t push a child to let go of you.

What the song is saying

The chorus carries the paradox of parenting: you lose something every day—the version of your child that will never come again—and that loss is bearable because you want their growth. You want to watch who they become. The verse admits how hard it is to watch them cry, and how much you’d like to spare them… even while knowing they’ll learn the important things by living them.

Why it stays with me

Because it’s a time capsule that keeps updating itself. It remembers the baby in the backpack, the aisle at a wedding, the room where we sing harmony, and the phone calls now between grown children and their parents. It also nudges me as a new grandfather—to bless the growth ahead and to keep doing the quiet work that helps love remain.

Source: New Music Memoir (1).docx

From the Being Human journal

I was a brand-new, first time parent when I wrote Don’t Grow Away. When I watched my first daughter wake up, I know all sunrises, all sunsets, all everythings… would now be different. I also knew that I wanted two things very much: for this little one to grow and thrive… and to never create the necessity of this little one to have to, as a part of growing, separate from me.

Source: Being Human: The Songs — Album & Journal (2020) · p. 9

Being Human · The Songs

Reflection & journaling

Theme: Parenting / Mentoring

Choose a question or word or line(s) from the lyrics to guide your meditation or journaling as you listen.

1. Who am I parenting or mentoring?
2. Who is parenting or mentoring me?
3. What is the dynamic of closeness / distance in these relationships?
4. Is it possible to grow beyond a parent or mentor without having to grow separate from them?
5. What might enable that?

Source: Being Human: The Songs — Album & Journal (2020) · p. 9