The Trio.

{OR: the cutting work of motherhood.}

Tonight we decorated the tree with all five kids. Sometimes in life we don’t know we are experiencing a “last time.” And what a blessing that can be. There is a heaviness that comes in realizing a door is being eternally locked shut, and I think knowing all of our “last times” would be paralyzing. When was the last time I held Gabe? When I put him down that day, I had no way of knowing that I would never again in my lifetime pick him up. Had I known, I would have never put him down– and in my stubborn mom-ness of not wanting to let go, I would probably be carrying him still. How awkward. I am five foot four and he is over six feet now and towers over me.

Thank God for all the things we don’t know. For all the things we don’t take heed of in the moment.

As an older mom, I struggle with taking too much heed. I am wise enough to know there will be a last time and that it is coming like a thief. I run the risk of trying to hold everyone right where they are and not let them grow too big to hold. All too often, I make it all about me.

As we hastily gathered to decorate the tree, it being later in the season than usual due to schedules, I knew this was one of those “last times.” In full disclosure: I don’t even really enjoy decorating the tree. It’s one of those things that has to be done, and the kids always kind of liked it, and I just showed up and kept things from breaking. But as years stack one on one, rhythms are formed and patterns emerge and even mundane things become part of the family fabric. So I played my usual role, carefully unwrapping and handing out each ornament. The river of tradition…

I tried to just soak in it.

I tried to observe and float and concentrate on carefully cupping the water in my hands as tightly as I could to bless it before it trickled away. Haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Past. And I think I understand now why sometimes my dad is so quiet when we are all together. Maybe he is just soaking. There is a parental Knowing when children grow into independence, that every gathering is so entirely special because we have released them, and only they get to choose when and if to migrate back.

Suddenly each ornament was a little piece of Time. Gabe’s kindergarten ornament–no one else sees it like I see it. I see that little boy tipping hither and thither on his little green stool, me taking too many photos hoping one would be perfect. I remember choosing that shirt that day and knowing this would be an heirloom but also maybe it was the last clean shirt that would suffice. He was so little. His legs are now longer than his entire body was that day. I don’t want to hand the ornament off to anyone–I want to tuck it back into the box and keep it safe. There’s Tenny’s handmade giant kindergarten ornament that steals the spotlight. We didn’t do that on purpose, but it’s so appropriate. Then there’s the embarrassing fact that we never made a kindergarten ornament for Quinn. Every year we nod and admit we failed him in that and many other things as our ‘big little in the middle.’ He’s hated that nickname since it’s inception, but I love it and it’s stuck.

There they all were. It was the last time that all five of them would be in one room chatting and hanging ornaments and refusing to hang ornaments and being silly and insane and: present. And afterward heading to their beds… all under this roof.

This one “last time.”

As we were finishing up, and the entire ordeal didn’t take us very long – Ross suddenly gathered all the tall ones together and stood them against the dining room doorway for one last height measure. It was then that I knew he was feeling it, too. The heaviness of this “last.” We were shocked by how many inches Tennyson has grown in the past year. He is almost as tall as me now. Just a half inch away. They grow. They all just grow. We don’t even see it happening. We need a doorway to check and to document and to remind us — they are growing.

The trio, my oldest batch of three boys who enjoyed almost a decade before little siblings entered the picture ~ lives here still, inseparable, within these walls tonight. As they have from the day we moved in almost a decade back. And almost a decade before that in our first home.

And soon the eldest, the one who was there the day that I became a momma, the little boy who changed me forever and worked a miracle transformation in my soul – will be making a new home for himself… and his wife.

And the trio that once bounded around my home, bounced on my knees and in my heart… the trio will be no longer together.

And that breaks a piece of my heart right off.

I read in Hannah Coulter that a child leaving home feels like an amputation.

As she was so right. Wendell Berry, thank you for giving words to this feeling.

I am in the cutting-off process. The amputation surgery. I know it’s for the best, I know the limb must go, that it’s not good for either of us for him to stay… but the cutting-away hurts.

If I am honest, it brutally hurts.

Yet this is the very purpose of motherhood. The growing of new limbs, and the letting go of them. We aren’t meant to hold our babies forever. We get them for a very short time, as God intended, and we release them into their purpose at the necessary time declared by their Maker. We get our short time.

And then the sun sets.

Have I made the most of my time with him? It’s a question that waits for us at the surgeon’s table. I invested everything I had into this shortness of time. I knew I couldn’t be a great woman of work while also being a great mother–it isn’t in me. I made that choice 19 years ago–to go all-in on this brief thing called childhood. I let go of everything else and fully swam in the ocean of raising him. It has been a beautiful growing, an epic adventure that a heart can live on into old age, nursing home reflections.

I praise God for giving me the knowing and the sense to follow my heart. To care more about time than money, though He ended up blessing us with both and always keeping us afloat. My reflections are full of God’s goodness and provision.

And now it morphs into something new.

If I am honest, I am excited to watch the new chapter.

If I am honest, it will require me to hold tight to the Hand of Jesus.

If I am honest, there will be phantom pains where it feels like the limb is still there. And an aching that it isn’t.

~Stephanie.