Changes in time

My House
recycled cans, photos on wood

This morning, I put my son on an airplane for the third time this year. Yesterday was all about printing boarding passes and shuttle info and packing and what did he want that last dinner at home for a while to be.

My heart gets heavy when I drop him off.  I want to follow him through the airport, make sure all who come in contact with him know that he is special and treasured by his mother, his family.

Of course I can’t.  Can’t get out of the car, much less make a fuss at the airport.  Crazy place now anyway airports.

While I am intellectually aware of this passage of time as being one of changes, my little bird is trying his wings: that doesn’t make it easier emotionally.  This is my little baby.  My baby boy.

I know I have done the right thing, letting him go off, not fretting in front of him, but I want to.  I guess I want to cry “don’t grow up”!! 

This is probably the most difficult change to have to go through.  Sending my child off to college.  Of course, I dotted all the I’s, crossed all the T’s, to organize and prepare him for this time, as best as anyone could. 

Children fill up the cracks and crevices of our being.  As a mom I am so used to the noise, the physical space, the time and effort that goes into raising a child.  And then he’s gone, the house is empty, and it feels like my heart is going to break, ( intellectually I know it’s not) but I am releasing my man-child into the world to have his own experiences-- separate from me.  

Along with these changes in this time continuum I have to change.  And it’s hard.  I have to stop doing all the laundry, grocery shopping and taking care and pull back and let him do it or not himself.

And that is hard, because of course I want him to do it my way, right? I am the mom after all.

Underneath missing him is wanting to see him do well.  Wanting to see him become a man and move forward in his life.  It’s a weird double edged experience. 

There is a book by Robert Munsch, Love You Forever, about a mother and son.  And the life cycle.  The boy grows and grows and grows until he becomes a man.  A little rhyme runs through it “love you forever, like you for always as long as I’m living my baby you’ll be”. 

Three and eight year old boys

The first days after he has headed back to school are always rough for me. I have to re-find my balance of moving forward in my life and of being a nest without any little birds in it.

Two Young Men
(two little birds heading out into the world)
headed towards their destiny