This is the year she launches. Class of 2024. And I’m kinda shy to admit it, but in this moment, I feel more ready for this reality than I ever imagined I would. I know, I know, check in with me again come summer and it might be a different song I sing. But for now, I am here. Some of this readiness comes from knowing that Maple and I are on more solid footing in our relationship with one another than I had once imagined we could be. Most of it comes from simply knowing how ready she is. It is no surprise that I adore her to no end and I will miss her with every single scrap of my being. But I also feel confident in my ability to mother her well into her adulthood; into and through her flight from our nest.
I arrived at this ready place through the slow and methodical step by step sequence of the countless days and years spent observing the child in front of me and repeatedly efforting to repair my inumerable mistakes. I continue to earn her trust and her respect every day. It is the heart of my daily work as mom. I have learned that as her mother-as anyone’s mother-neither is given, and I have come to believe that our children owe us absolutely nothing. If I want to stay relevant and a function as a meaningful source of support in her life, I must continue to work on me and stay adaptive and flexible and above all honest and humble.
I am really up for this task. Maple woke me up to my life’s greatest devotion as her and her brothers’ unconditional love source. Over the course of her life thus far I have learned that none of that looks like what was shown to me in my own upbringing. I am not an immovable force. Loving my children wholly puts every part of me on the line, including and maybe most especially my outdated ideas of the function of a so called adult authority.
I am no such thing. I am a grown guide. Still moving on the path of my own becoming. Further along than my offspring perhaps but just as malleable and fallible as anyone else. I am a work in progress and I think in this way I continue to model to our children the persistent nature of growing into the best versions of ourselves. I am not a done deal. And as such it seems only fitting that the story now can be one in which we each get to grow into something new.
Maple’s departure has the opportunity for all of us to also depart and likewise arrive. Which is all of life really, isn’t it? Chapters, and seasons, and eras. The closing of doors doesn’t mean we leave everything behind each time we walk through a new threshold. There is so much we each carry with us. Often more than we wish and typically more than we need, but I think we get to choose a bit in that crossover too. My hope is that through a culture of personal and collective consideration, along with an earnest curiosity into the wonders of living and learning and loving, that we continue to walk along with one another, sometimes in near and sometimes in remote ways, for as long as the road can carry us.
I am so excited for her. And that eases some of my trepidation about not having her under my wing every day soon enough. This last year has taught me a thing or two about trust, a few chapters within the larger tome of letting go, and I am not so reluctant to break as I have been in the past. This breaking will be my next becoming. I mean, obviously, right?
I think it is so incredibly perfect and poetic that the last full year that we had all of our children in our home with us was also the last year in which I fed our children with my body in this lifetime. My physical body departed from the shores of ‘first home for children’ this past year and set a course out into the broader terrain of life’s path toward an inevitable dissolution. I am releasing myself into more of the matter of space, so I can move out into the world more, as they do. I will travel on breezes, over hillsides, through crowded cities, galleries, theaters, playing fields, across shorelines and out toward horizons.
So, for now, OK. It is ok. This was always the plan and we are living it. Just because we are here now, does not mean that we no longer see. Sending love.