When she goes

We are weeks away now. She’s leaving.

And although she’ll be back, although we know this is just for a short season, we all also know that the simple act of not being here for a time will change things. Everything, really.

 

It’s a palpable sensation, this slight separation. Mary Hannah is making the leap into adulthood, and while our hearts are as bound together as ever, while there is nothing standing between to divide us, the tension between her present and her future is something everyone can feel.

For Mathaus–her best friend, her confidant, the ballast to her buoyancy– there is a seed of impatience between them I’ve never seen before. Unable to fully voice all the happenings in his heart, not yet mature enough to grasp her desire to embrace the new while clinging to the old, Mathaus has struggled to hear all of her plans and feel the kind of joy for her that he might otherwise have.

For John Mark, there is already a mourning so deep as to be nearly physical. From the beginning, he claimed her as a safe person in his life: someone he can rail against in one tempestuous second and collapse into in the next. The realization of her absence has him grasping at a new reality–if Mary Hannah is growing up, I have to as well.

Then there’s me. Try though we might, it’s impossible not to take the presence of our children for granted. They simply are, in every moment. I am making dinner, Simon is on the floor pushing Matchbox cars, Mary Hannah is training the dog in the family room. I am folding clean clothes in my bedroom with Birdie, John Mark, and Phineas. I am nursing Jude on the couch, Jack is reading in the corner, Mathaus is telling me about a coding conundrum. Always, these people round out my days. And while I am used to my husband coming in and out of the routine, Mary Hannah has always been a constant. My entire adult life … she has been by my side.

I will miss her in ways I don’t even know yet, and that is slightly frightening. I am so used to the dance between us, the way we fill the space in each other’s lives. Together we laugh, and we clash, and we help one another, and we talk about things as ridiculous as French verbs and as meaningful as finding a husband. The day I make breakfast without her emptying the dishwasher beside me and telling me what she dreamt the night before …

 

In a few weeks, she will step out from under our roof for a time. She’ll be back. But for how long? Only God knows. The natural order of things is for our children to take flight, to fly into the future He has planned for them. This branching out, this step towards her call, is just the first goodbye on the way to the bigger hello. Our family is changing. Of course, it was changing all along. But this is a new kind of change, a deeper shift.

Sitting on the edge of what we knew was coming all along is a precarious place of anticipation. In a few weeks, we take the plunge, and will never be the same.