Letting Go to Hold, a Mother's Work.

Life is such that one must ceremoniously learn the art of letting go in order to hold on.

My first born attends college today.
My second walked a jagged line into her Junior year.

Both grown.
Neither, grown.

In the middle of their growth, I daily inhale them like the scent of newborn baby head, but now...differently.

I catch my pause at the top of my breath as they offer themselves to a world in which I have no control, in a slow lean toward leaving the one I created for their sense of it.

A week from now, my third born, whose giggles and highly charged nervous system usually dominate the temperature of our house, will for the first time ever, spend 5 days a week, out of it.

Who will we be when it's just the little wee at home all day come Autumn?

And that too - will be but a breeze on the wind (God willing) that I'll be writing about in what feels like no longer than a long held breath.

Life is witness to surrender that one cannot catch and keep what they love without a cost of freedom on both parts.

One can only love & watch & love & watch.

We grow up & we grow way, way, way deep into places of ourselves we learn eventually, cannot be kept either - like the breath or the breeze.

But we grow there, as our passages & passangers grow away, not separate from us, but by Grace, grow us bigger in the distance of our newly collective sense of... awayness.

The space created between though seems powered by grief & loss, is a bigness of connection not yet curiously navigated.

Growth is wild, and letting go to let grow is wildly uncomfortable.

As the wind beckons the fall, mothers like trees are asked to trust in the soil that holds them up as they offer their seeds to the same soil. They're asked not to make, but to allow a space for those seeds to wrap around their roots, in the seeds own way, separate from the curves of ours, but...next to.

Even if only by heart.

The connection not lost at all, but changed.
Distant by sight, but close, by night.

There I'll be. Watching.

Dropping leaves on the breeze, trusting the wind that cushions them and the soil in which they'll land to grow them up strong.

Loving in natures way instead of mine, and letting go with faith that nurture lives in other places other than me.

Exhaling my breath to hold on to our life.

There I'll be. Breathing in & through it.

And watching & loving & watching.

Even when my breath is no more and letting go means something more than a mothers daily living task...there I'll be, watching & loving & watching & loving.