Category: Letting Go

I’ve heard about heartstrings.  I’ve probably sung about them.  I don’t think I quite understood them until today.

Heartstrings tie us to others.

 They are real.

 I felt mine today.

Being human is being connected to others.  It is love, sacrifice, and the absolute forfeiture of us that brings about “we”.  It is in the depletion of self that we allow ourselves to be connected.

It is in this that we can equate with others.

A mother is so privileged.  She knows how to do this.

At the end of this time that I’ve chosen to write, I choose to not write about the pain, the loss, or the closure that I’ve reached.  I am choosing to write about the benefit and the liberty that is revealed to me in this moment.

I read about another mother today who wrote about how this final chapter in raising her children is like closing a door.   It can be that.  And I guess in many ways it is.

 It is really the end.

The end of days and nights of mothering, it is.  But it is not the end of being a mother.

 As long as they are alive, we will be their mothers.  My mother is mine and will always be so, as long as I live.

I am theirs. No chapter closing will end that.  Only fate and destiny control that portal’s closure.

I felt the strings pulling me back as I drove home from Boston today. I felt the heartstrings straining, and the car moved forward.  The ache in my chest was almost unbearable.

I love them.  I am connected.

 Yet, I am linked but not attached.  I wrote about this perforated attachment when my oldest daughter was a baby.  I always knew this day would come.

I don’t want to be melancholy.  This is really a good day.  It is a moment in time worth cherishing.

 Both of my adult children are beginning anew.  I am just a mere four hours away by car.

Yet, I’m not really the main character in the sequel to this story.  The characters are represented as blocks of color that will be filled in as the story unfolds.

I am grateful.  I have learned from love in ways that my younger self couldn’t have imagined.

I remember listening to love songs as a teenager and thinking how wonderful it would be to love someone.  I never knew that love would give me more, teach me more, and guide me more than I could ever conceive.

Love is really all there is.  Love is an open book, not a closed one.

At this moment, I am humbly appreciative.

I am forever held together with the fabric of a heartstring.  I am perpetually thankful and incessantly grateful.

Heartstrings exist.  They fasten us to others.

Unity is wonderful.  It is strong.  That is why heartstrings will never break, and it does not matter how far they are pulled apart.

That is what I have learned.  There is a time to be filled with gratitude.  That is what this time is.

“Don’t look back, you’re not going that way!”-

If only I’d known how many turns she’d take!- 7/2015

Are We Turning the Corner?

Yesterday, truly, I felt paused and in an anxious halt.  My child didn’t want to talk about what is to come.  They seemed paralyzed in the moment.  I felt frustrated and confused.

Tonight, we did the laundry together. It wasn’t awful. It was pleasant.

This child knows how to fold clothes better than I do!

I saw faint hints of a smile today that weren’t there yesterday.  They may be turning the corner.

Are we both?

I think so.

There have been so many milestones and corners turned over the years.  However, this one is like turning the corner in a foreign city.  The streets are strange, awkward and uncharted.  It is uneasy moving forward and almost too frightening to turn the corner.

Maybe that is what we’ve been feeling all week.

But I suppose the streets are less dark today than yesterday.  They seem safe enough to turn the wheel, at least a bit.

I know there are so many people who are turning corners more frightening than ours and that it seems silly to be so distressed about something as simple as an offspring going to college.  But I, the mother, want my child to move onward with risk abandoned and with resoluteness and purpose.

The grin beamed of progress.

The corner is just ahead waiting to be turned.  I’ll see you all around the bend and I’ll let you know how it is when we get to the other side.