Yesterday, we took our first daytrip to the beach without all of the boys. The oldest was working. Today, the middle one drove solo for the first time. He got his driver’s license on Friday. He’s the really busy one and his busyness always necessitated a ride in the middle of my free time. So, we celebrate this new freedom right along with him, rather than validate the pit in our stomach provoked by the thought that “this is really happening.”
As a wise friend’s wise mother used to say, “Only sick birds don’t leave the nest.”
So, I don’t ask for time to stop or slow down because it is all well, and happening as it should. I’ve mentioned it before, but my friend calls the years your children are home, before anyone can drive, the “sweet spot”. Everybody is home, safe and secure under a loving and watchful eye. My sweet spot is disintegrating, but I am grateful that it has been slow and gentle. Measured in days and years, not seconds and minutes.
These past two weeks, many young people have lost their lives to murdering madmen. I get lost in trying to accompany their parents in their grief. I don’t know any of them, but I obsess, pray, and force myself into the present. And repeat. I see social media posts of people continuing to smile and live their lives like nothing has happened. I am amazed at this, at first. And then I join them, because I need the distraction. It is refreshing to see and share the good, as well as the bad, I reason. Like some weird balance in this land of unrelated-but-loosely-connected people.
Though social media wasn’t born, yet, Dr. Haim Ginott in “Between Parent and Teenager” describes the benefit of these loose connections, well. “Many teenagers are tormented by terrors they think private and personal. They do not know that their anxieties and doubts are universal. This insight is hard to convey. Each teenager must attain it on their own. It takes time and wisdom to realize that the personal parallels the universal, and what pains one man pains mankind.”
We have so much to learn from one another.
I sat with her again on Friday. She was asleep at the dining room table and came to with a touch on the shoulder and mention of her name. We flipped through her book, looking at the pictures. She didn’t remember writing it, seem to recognize her name on the cover, nor think it odd that if someone else wrote it, they sure included a lot of pictures of her family.
I was grateful again that she has given us so much to talk about in these pages of hers. Laugh-out-loud moments with her children, layers of loss, years of sacrifice, and joys beyond all telling. If we didn’t have them, I fear the shallowness of what would remain in their absence.
One day, I may be dependent upon a stranger who visits frequently to tell me again who she is and what is this, again? Hopefully, hearing the stories will pluck the strings in my soul, releasing all of the chords to my favorite song. I will remember how we all “survived being alive”, and marvel at how whole and integrated I feel after a long life of unhurried and gentle disintegration, and a visit from a stranger.
❤️
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