The Letting-Go's of Motherhood and the Sisterhood of the Hot Mess

Change and the unpredictable give me anxiety.  There's a morning routine I obsess over: two cups of coffee in a preheated mug, while sitting in the cheetah chair, reading.  I love my routines. Every evening, when the children are upstairs, Selden and I have dessert on the couch and watch an episode of a show. (Or we scroll through Netflix's suggestions for us, which indicate they need to hire a new person to come up with some computer program that picks out suggested shows, because besides being incredibly predictable, I'm also incredibly averse to being scared, so I cannot understand why Netflix keeps telling me I would probably love "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."  Or Bob Ross's painting show. Although his hair is sort of epic.  Is there no middle ground?) 

Letting go is not my favorite thing either.  I have a box in the garage full of things that I am keeping for sentimental reasons: a coke wrapper from our trip to Ukraine, the top I cut off a pizza box that selden wrote on and left for me on the porch swing at the old house when we were first were getting to know each other, a puzzle Selden made for me years ago. And I think I've kept every single drawing the children have ever made.  I just can't get rid of them.  I even have my grandmother's old dining room table in my garage, because I feel too nostalgic about it to have seen her give it away when she downsized.  And maybe in 5 years Lia will want it at her house, right?  I mean, parking in the garage is so over-rated.

In no other endeavor are change and letting go more inevitable than in mothering.  I can remember  when Sage was born, and I was so thrilled to have her to look at and hold,  but also I had a twinge of sadness that she was not going to be with me, in my belly, everywhere I went, twenty-four hours a day.  I'm over that now, because the fact is that even when they're born, they're with you most of the time.  Especially in the bathroom, it seems. I might build a fortress around my claw-foot tub, because another routine I cherish is my evening bubble bath, and part of the loveliness is the aloneness, which my daughters seem not to have gotten the memo about. 

One of the things my girlfriends and I group-text about more than almost anything else is mothering.  We usually don't know if we're doing it right, and we encourage each other with the fact that all the rest of us are pretty sure we don't know what we're doing either.  We remind each other to rock on, because we're all just winging it, but at least we're winging it together.

(For my 30 days of heart-monitor-wearing last spring, however, I also texted frequently about my fear that someone at the grocery store would call homeland security on me for looking like a homegrown terrorist-housewife strapped with a bomb, since I had all these electrodes and wires all over the place... Or that perhaps someone would think I was working undercover with the FBI.)

The thing we mostly don't know how to do is the letting go, and wouldn't you know it, that's the thing we can't help but keep having to do.

One of my girlfriends is taking her little baby to daycare for the first time this morning.  

Another friend is heading to a preschool open house this week, because she sends her littlest one off to preschool soon.

And I'm trying alternately to stop time and to just not think about time, because my oldest is starting senior year, and I can barely imagine what it'll be like to come home to a house without Lia next August.  It will be way too quiet, way too tidy (oh, is that a thing?), and I don't really remember life without her in the house anymore. Plus she's the only one here who has an appreciation for my 90's hiphop.

It's kind of weird how just when your kids are turning into these really cool adult people who you want to hang out with a whole lot, that's when they move out.  If it had been up to me, I'd have sent Lia to college at about the time she was in The Eye Rolling Stage, and I'd definitely want her to be back right about now, because she's pretty cool.  

And as soon as we're done getting used to Lia being off, Eli will be heading off himself.  And I don't know what I'll do when I don't have shoes the size of party barges to trip over in the entryway or "Big Francis," the seafoam metallic Mercedes wagon from the early 90's - the really cool style with the backward-facing seats - that he looks so sweet driving, parked in the driveway.  

There's nothing like being powerless to remind me that I'm powerless.  (Being able to control stuff is right up there with loving my routine and being alone in the bathroom.) But I'm powerless to slow time, and I'm powerless to keep things from changing.  And part of the job description of being a mom is the letting go, because they aren't even actually mine to begin with.  Each of these kids, when they were teeny, we dedicated to God. We acknowledged they were His and that we were being trusted to raise them to know the Lord and to hopefully not mess them up more than what some decent counseling would be able to fix. 

I'm sitting here thinking about this, wanting to have something profound to say, and I don't.  I've got nothing. The only thing I know to be true, besides that time keeps moving and we keep having to let go of one season to enter the next one is this:  I've never been ready for the next thing until it's time for the next thing.  And every time, God's grace has met me at the point of change, and it's always been ok.  

The above photo is a misrepresentation of my Republican Primary allegiance, but Ben Carson was no longer running, so I did caucus for my grandmother's "boyfriend" Ted.  But in real life, I actually still frequently wear my Ben Carson hat. And t-shirt. But I digress.

And in the moments leading up to the being ok, when I'm still feeling like a hot mess, I'm so thankful for the girlfriends who will admit to sometimes feeling like a hot mess too, who will sit around Mexican food or lattes or too much chocolate froyo, talking and laughing and walking together through the days we can't control and the ways we have to let go,  who point my heart back to the God who has promised that He knows the plans He has for us and that they are full of hope and a good future.   Because as good as the season is right now (except for the bathroom company part), the next season is going to be good as well.