Letting Go

I wrote this last year when my first went to Kindergarten. It's been a year of adjustment, and though painful, there has been a lot of growth--and joy. I thought I'd put it up since I didn't have a blog at the time.

Letting Go

As I watch the waves crash in and swish out across the sand, I notice how the things I’m learning seem to do the same in my life. A theme will come in to the front of my life and then ebb out only to come back again.

Recently that theme has been letting go. I feel like permission to hold onto anything has been stripped away and I am left trying to hold my hand open, relaxing the muscles, wishing I could close it tight.

Two ice blue eyes bounced up and down near my waist, excited to start this new adventure of school. To me it was our last walk together as my baby. We had been walking together for nearly six years…I as the mom and she as the baby. It was hard for me to let her go grow up.

It’s hard to write about, trite as it is. I expected some tears, but the gush that came after I was out of eyeshot of the school was as surprising as the tsunami. The wave just came up and swallowed me.

There are probably many reasons. For one, the deafening quiet my firstborn left in her wake constantly reminded me of the change. There is hardly any way I could fill up the silence and lack of constant conversation.

The other is that it was a change in our team. It had been me and her together for so long. During good and hard times, she was my constant companion. When my husband would leave on long trips, she joined me in the night. “I’ll always be with you when you have hard times,” she would say. Her presence was a comfort.

Sharing. How hard I had worked on that concept with her, but had failed to see I was reluctant to share her with others. Always her passion was to be out there, finding new friends. The world is full of opportunities.

Also, I enjoyed our relationship where we could understand each other. Our experiences were so much the same, that we understood each other completely. She was convinced that I could read her mind, and many times she did the same for me. It was a common vocabulary with parallel connotations. I knew that was going to begin to change.

Change. I’ve never been good with it. It ties my stomach all in knots. I get headaches. I cry. It hurts to change. It’s a grieving process, even when the change is a good one, a happy one. I wish I could see it differently, but life is a series of births and deaths. Not just people, but phases in life. Constant death is in my life. The intense, painful, constant change of life.