August 9th

My eldest son walks hastily into the room, banging our door against the wall, causing a crack to shake me awake. It’s his first day of middle school, and the giddiness of a child who knows they’re growing up is saddled on his face. 

I’m giddy also, in a mourning sort of way. My eldest child invoked the mother in me, ushering me across the boundary between a young fragile woman, and one who had to learn resilience. A rite of passage for us both, as I face 30. I imagined meeting this place in my life, and having had attained some kind of deep wisdom about the meaning of life, and instead I find, I’m just as lost as before, with only slightly more confidence about how to stand steady when the world crumbles around you. 

Children face growing with such determination. The gateway of unknowns they think they should experience before them, haunting them in their waking moments, flaunted before them by adults who are merely coping with the pains of reality. Children imagine these experiences as the most expansive things they could have, failing to recognize that true expansion exists in the play of childhood. Soon, my boy, will take on the rigidity of a teenager, pulling further away from me, and deeper into himself. As he is supposed to.

I ask to take a picture of him, and he smiles, love and trust in his eyes for me. Our time has segued into the phase of pushing, and pulling, where he will expand away from me in every direction, and I am supposed to allow for this break. In many ways, I desire the break as well, for a time when my life will be my own again. My time empty, to be filled with my own longing; words and dreams. And in others, I feel the rope between our rafts, the one that keeps me afloat, slowly fraying. Drifting off to sea, with nothing in my identity to ground me to purpose. When I am no longer funneling my energy into keeping his raft afloat, and he is responsible for paddling himself out to sea, to save himself from the rough waters of existence; I feel I will drown. Luckily, I have two more children to direct and care for, before the true chasm will occur, but the unsteady ground of learning to mourn the growing of your children meets my feet and asks me to cross this new threshold. 

In but 6.5 years, I may wake up to a house that only holds two of the bodies which I birthed from my own, made of my very nutrients. Pulled from my bones, quilted from my blood, blessed with breath from my own lungs; asked to separate when there has been no previously reliable division. I trust that I will survive this expansion of my life, yet the pain of it, at this time seems unimaginable. Today, I focus on instilling him positively with support and love for his growth, so that he knows it is safe to make his gradual approach to the edge of this nest, to find himself, to leap when it is time.