Someday, it will seem right.
Someday, you will stand up from my table, stretch your legs, thank me for supper, maybe offer to throw a few plates in the dishwasher. And then you will head home.
Someday, Christmas mornings in my house will be a far away memory, and I will see your smile on a screen across the miles as you bounce my grandbabies on your lap and try to keep your dog from eating the last remnants of the discarded wrapping paper.
Someday, even if you live just down the road, you will not know what’s in my fridge, or that I just bought new bath towels, or that I replaced the batteries in the smoke detectors.
You will make your own mortgage payments. You will decide a reasonable bedtime for yourself, for your kids. You will grab fast to some of our traditions and reject others outright. You will count among your closest friends people I will only meet at birthday parties and special events; if the miles between us are too great, I may never meet them at all.
And it will all seem right. Somehow.
But right now, the phone call that beckons you away to a job that is not just a job, but a calling … the opportunities to go and see and make choices that will bring new arcs into the storyline of your life …
It is all so new, and so fresh. It’s not wrong. But it’s not right. Not yet.
In a few months it will be old hat. A few years and it will be a foregone conclusion. This is the continuing of the adventure we began together at your birth, and while I pray we never meet a total fork in the road, we will, necessarily, walk apart more often than not once you reach adulthood. You will go where God calls, and so will I. But though we follow the same voice, we will– each one of us– be beckoned in different directions.
For now we work through the baby steps, the gentle prying apart of all that interdependence we’ve enjoyed. You learn new skills, gain more and more autonomy. I get used to explaining your absence, or assuming that you’ve made your own doctor’s appointment, or not counting your portion as I ladle soup into bowls. I feel the lack of you when your bed is empty at night. I understand, in my being, that it’s not yet time for you to fly, fully, from under the shelter of these wings.
But in time, we will know that to stay longer would be to miss God’s greater vision. Someday, you will itch for the morning to come when your coffee is poured from your own pot, where the little ones clambering over your legs are your own and not your siblings. Someday you will pack your bags and strike out, and I will cry. Maybe you will, too. And someday, though not exactly today, it will seem right.
Your sentiments are so beautifully profound. My eldest son is 15, and I know we will cry when that day comes. I cry every time I think about it (which I try not to do often, or else my family would be swimming in a sea of my tears). I’m crying now. Thank you very much for sharing those precious words from your heart. BTW, your son is a handsome boy. I will say a prayer right now, that he would always follow the Lord’s path for his life, and that when the day comes, and his absence just seems “right”, that the Lord would comfort your heart, and bless you for following the Lord’s path for your life. 🙂
You will. And it will be sooner than you think. But I pray it will be good, and that you will see many blessings grow as he steps into his own!