Blest to have children in different life stages: preteens, elementary and preschool, I get to experience letting go a little bit at a time. I notice with my third child that I am way more relaxed on the daily stuff, yet more melancholy on the big things. I get that this will be the last year of lunch dates, PJ days, and of kids in the front of the grocery cart.
The empty nest is a long way off. A hasn't even going to kindergarten yet and we'll be way into our "senior years" before she graduates from college. However, I have the ability to see things from a perspective of a young mom with preschool kids and an experienced mom with soon to be teenage kids. It really is the "best of both worlds" as that Disney show song goes. I get to play with preschool toys and talk with a young man who sit next to me in the car and has a working knowledge of politics, religion and life.
C will be an official teenager this March. Wow!
He's gotten to be so mature in so many ways. He is such a nice young man who loves Jesus, his family (even his little sisters most of the time) and all things "math related." When I see him now I get a glimpse of the man he will become. Tenderhearted, deep thinking, passionate about people and God, and with a real sense of justice.
I remember when he was just a little guy with big dreams to be a "rocket scientist" and, today, I can see that those big dreams could be coming true.
But there are times that it pulls at my heartstrings to see him growing up. Like today. He's off camping with his Boy Scout troop this weekend at a Boy Scout Camp. This is a camp that was hit by a tornado just over a year ago and four young men my son's age lost their lives.
C is camping this weekend on that hallow ground. It makes my stomach drop thinking of those mother's who sent their young men off to summer camp and never got to see them alive again this side of heaven. It breaks my heart to think of C going off and never coming back home again.
This afternoon C and I were looking up the weather for the camp and came across a few of the pictures from that Tornado. Like the wise young man he is becoming he said, you know I bet if that had happened at a camp that wasn't filled with Boy Scouts a lot more people would have died. They were prepared. They knew what they were doing. He's right.
Being a mother that trusts God is hard. I trust Him that he will watch over my son this weekend. That C will come home Sunday morning alive and well and with a backpack filled with mud and dirt and smelly socks.
When C put on his Boy Scout Backpack this afternoon filled with warm clothes, enough hand warmers for 100 hours of heat, lots of wool knitted socks, a fleece blanket liner and a little note from his sisters, I had to fight back a few tears. You see, I realize that each time I let him go away, he grows in leaps in bounds. He experiences things that will define who he is and the man he will become. He grows up just a little more and the wings that will one day take him off to his future are growing and getting stronger.
It's what I want for him, but it also means that the little boy is slowly slipping away.
However, when I saw that his backpack is still bigger than him and that we can't put his sleeping bag or foam liner on it for fear it will topple him over, I realize that, thankfully, he still has a little growing to do. My job is not yet finished. We still have time to "train him up in the way he should go."
Thank you God for giving me the opportunity to say goodbye to that little boy a little bit at a time. It makes the joy of seeing the young man inside much easier to take on this mother's heart.
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