The weight

It’s been almost agonizing, watching the box at the foot of her bed fill with sheets, spiral notebooks, wool socks. Bit by bit, the elements of my daughter’s life are being distilled into the essentials–the things she cannot leave behind, and the things she will need the most in her new role as a midwifery student.

There are textbooks– most with laborious, detailed titles like “Emergency Delivery Protocols for Out-of-Hospital Midwives.” There are flip-flops for hygienic showering. There are well-loved t-shirts, and the little white stuffed rabbit she has carried with her literally around the globe.

I watch my daughter weigh every item, deciding whether it will make this next journey.

“It’s a good thing I’m a pro at this,” she tells me, tucking a treasured necklace back into a storage box, and I realize suddenly that the painful goodbyes of the last year have paid off in ways I could never have imagined.

Still, there are hard choices, and hard moments. At the dinner table, I watch John Mark burst into tears as it dawns on him that two more sleeps has become one more sleep, and when he wakes up his sister, his rock, his confidant, his friend … she will be his only via telephone and FaceTime. There is the bittersweet beauty of Mary Hannah insisting on doing small things for Jude, because she knows that when she returns he will not be as willing to rest in her arms. She will have been lost from his tribe of trusted few, and have to regain her status, and it will hurt.

Equally painful has been the sorting of my own Momma heart as I hold her hand through this process. There are things I would voice, desires I would share were I not so certain that this path is the one God has prepared. My human inclination is to add to the weight of the items she carries with a “Don’t go!” and “Find something closer.” But I know firsthand the burden that adds to an already heavy load. And really … I wouldn’t want it any other way.  So I hug her tighter and say, “I will miss you, but I can’t wait to hear about this adventure,” and I mean it, even when I push back my own ache.

Tomorrow, I put her on a plane. She is thrilled to be flying home. She will see autumn in the Northwest, and I see her break into a grin every time she thinks about being back in the region that has defined her. She will return to us before Thanksgiving, carrying a whole new box of tools and experiences. She will unpack her life again, though for how long? Who can say?

The comfort in this journey of parenthood is that the wheel is held neither by my child nor by myself. The Lord has a firm grasp on these comings and goings, on these changes and the seasons and even the details we cannot see. He is the one, ultimately, who will help her to bear the weight of all the baggage of this life. We trust in this, we move forward, and we rest in His hands.