Turning Another Page
In a few days I’ll be moving my youngest daughter to Denver. The anticipation of the nearly 1,000-mile trek has essentially paralyzed me, emotionally speaking. I never thought I would be one of those mothers who would become distraught when my baby birds flew the coop. In fact, I envisioned quite the opposite…overwhelmed by a sense of freedom, I would relish in the joy of filling my open time sans motherly duties. Never mind the fact that I taught my daughters how to cook, clean, and do laundry, and all three have been mostly self-sufficient since well before middle school.
I say mostly because if my eldest daughter’s kitchen is any indication, her pen must have run out of ink when she was taking notes on cleaning. The youngest tends to consider clean laundry piled—off the floor—in a spare room “put away,” and the middle child sometimes slips off the rails when cooking. We all cringe when she insists on making Gordon Ramsay scrambled eggs, and I’m still recovering from her attempt at preparing beef Wellington for Christmas dinner—there’s three days of my life I’ll never recover! But I digress.
I wonder… Is it the fear of silence and the absence of chaos with its perpetual ebb and flow—all of which threaten to envelop me—that have tipped my emotional scale? Lest I forget, God has blessed me with three “bonus” children, two of whom won’t grow wings for close to a decade. So in reality, there will be plenty of years to come in which the door will constantly open and close and an extra friend will pop up at the dinner table. There will be sleepovers and Scout outings to attend; homework and hormones to navigate; prayers and Bible stories to teach; and hugs and kisses to give.
The best part of embracing my new reality is that, unlike the past, I don’t have to do it alone. I have a true-life partner in my husband, not to mention four grown, mostly self-sufficient children to help out. A passage from Scripture comes to mind: “All good giving and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no alteration or shadow caused by change” (James 1:17). In the midst of life’s constant reality of change, may we find comfort in knowing we’re never alone. God has a plan.
