Jack is leaving. My heart is full of emotions, none of which come out well in words, all of which threaten to bring me to tears at any moment. I will miss him so much. I am so glad he’ll be testing out his fiery independent streak on someone else. I don’t want anyone to be unkind to him. I want someone to put him in his place. It feels so very wrong. It feels so very right. I have heaved big ugly sobs for a week now, and still, the well of my motherhood keeps pushing up new, harder feelings with which to grapple.
I can’t decide what I’m feeling from one moment to the next, and yet in the end, it doesn’t matter. We will drop him off at the airport and say goodbye to our boy, and begin the long wait for the return of a young man. While we wait, life will go on— for all of us.
Jack will be immersed in a experience that will shape him forever. It will be something none of us here will ever truly understand (well, unless one of the younger kids decides to enlist as well) and will always think of as something of a blackhole in the timeline of Jack’s life. But it won’t be. He’ll meet people, do things, gain new knowledge, be set on a course independent from his family of origin. He will change. We won’t see those changes in real time, so for us, he will remain frozen, suspended until we can throw our arms around him and welcome home the new Jack, the one we will have to give space as he shows us what pieces of the Jack we knew he has kept, and what new sprouts have sprung forth in the months we have been apart.
The flip side is that Jack will no doubt expect that something of a pause button has been pressed in our lives, as well. But no. While our lives will look different as they close up the raw seam around his absence, we will go on in our day to day. We think we know what it will look like, but of course, that’s folly. Yes, Mary Hannah and Mathaus will return to Bryan College, but Covid has ensured that the rhythm of their past expectations there have been disrupted. Here at home, shifts are afoot as the “littles” grow and learn and our family dynamic morphs, again, to envelope who we are now versus who we were then. We will move forward through July, August, September, October and the myriad jokes and fears and events and celebrations and sadnesses… and he will miss it all.
Writing that tears at my heart. Living it out just might be the hardest thing I’ve ever walked through as a mother to date.
In the military, Im learning, there are no goodbyes. There is only, “See you later.” It is whispered in the ears of husbands who walk tarmacs towards planes with destinations that lie over hours and hours of deep water. It is sobbed on the shoulders of mommies handing their preschoolers over to their own mothers for the next 18 months. It is written by aching middle schoolers in cards tucked into the corner of that familiar but ominous pack waiting at the ready by the door.
This will be our first real “See you later.” Please pray for us all, but most especially my Jack.