I have deleted my oldest from all my next-year spreadsheets. I no longer need to track her hours.  The silliest things hit me with sadness these days. I don’t even like tracking school hours.

We are on the brink of graduation, of major change in the family dynamic, of shifting and rearranging in a beautiful/heartbreaking way (for all of us.) Soon, on the nights when daddy’s gone, not one of them will be clambering to sleep in my bed. For now, I still say yes when the littler ones ask. 

We need a better name for how it feels to let go of your grown child

Because it’s not letting (I have no choice)

My white knuckled grasp is simply overpowered

By the passing of time and the work of God

In the maturing of my love and her life

It’s a little like giving birth: beautiful, painful.

This milestone adds such urgency to all of my thoughts and plans and goals for ALL of the kids. Carpe diem! Time is running out! Gather all the rosebuds, quick! Till the garden, pour the water out by the bucket, and weed, weed, weed, weed! 

But also, sit by the side of the garden and see them now, don’t rush their growth, Let it be slow and individual and in their own time, linger, wonder, give thanks, and don’t miss a single beautiful moment….

But I can’t do both, and I can’t do it all, and time is running out.

I see these teenagers, figuring it out, learning to be okay in their own selves.  They can’t do this with me hovering; they can’t BE themselves; they need room for trying things on the sloughing them off again, they need to answer the questions THEY are asking and in their own ways.  My oldest son tells me he likes pickles, and I congratulate him, seeing just one more way he’s learning to be HIM and not his mom or his dad. (He shrugs and looks out the window. Moms are weird.)

it’s like a song plays in this home

but it keeps getting interrupted

it’s choppy and moody-- 

we are just practicing

with pop songs played too fast, 

and hymns of joy,

with mom hollering from the kitchen

“one more verse of that song, son, I wasn’t done yet.”

notes of grief pour out unexpectedly

and then, chopsticks

cut short by dogs barking

and I just don’t see how it is going to come to a satisfying ending…

all this noise

perhaps I will hear it my whole life long

and it will only get quieter

staying unresolved

and I’ll still be in the kitchen,

pleading,

“Just one more verse? I wasn’t done yet.”