When Summer's Hours are Still

How long have I waited until the hustle and chaos of the school year ends? Imagining a rest, a quiet, a complete repose that is well deserved.
The school year had its drama, as well as its victories- from receiving an excellent grade on a grad school test I studied long and hard over, to telling my 17 year old daughter to change, again- those jeans are far too tight. From encouraging my teen age girls to eat some breakfast before their long morning at school only to hear how they can't eat so early. I remember 4:30 a.m. feedings with them when they were babies, cherishing the absolute stillness and softness of  both home and infant, not being able to imagine that tiny life I was feeding to ever be any bigger than my arms; wondering how it happens that a perfectly formed baby becomes a teen ager, ready to conquer the world with the typical teen mind that says, "I know it all".
This past school year brought on unexpected challenges, not unfamiliar to my family, as we meet what we were not prepared for often. But in the scope of what I had imagined as being the time line of my children's life, how it would easily travel from one event to another, in the order I had planned since giving birth to my little ones, this shift from what I had visualize- I was unprepared. For example, academically focused, this time line would start with elementary school, good grades and wonderful memories and friends, to high school, graduating in the top of the senior class, with scholarships, and plans of being a doctor, a missionary, a nurse, a pastor, and the ever smooth, ever determined step to college. I would cry as each one drove off in their own car, and wave until I lost sight of them down the road.
My reality- dropping out of high school to get his GED, attempting college 4 times, and each time dropping out, deciding the job pays too well to ever go to college, one choosing to homeschool some of her high school years, and two of my other girls wanting to join her. I will have 3 teen girls homeschooling this coming year! This is not what my mental time line predicted. There has been nothing easy or smooth about these high school years. I rarely, if ever, traveled along a straight line of events. It has been bumpy, dangerous, and full of peaks and valleys. I have been humbled-in the sense of having a deep, unmistakable feeling that I am completely incompetent to raise my children any longer.
But here we are now, today, sitting still in June, summer break, a chance to reflect and breath, to enjoy long runs again, library books, slow cooked meals, windows wide open with white sheer curtains dancing in the breeze. Here I am, alone in my house for a bit, all the other members of my family working, or here and there.
I find a deep uncertainty in my bosom of where time will bring us. I must rest this summer. I must find tranquility in the mundane, in the unexpected, in the acceptance of life not going as I had planned, so many years ago, when my new born babies were each gently placed into my longing arms, and I cried for their beauty, and set out to make it all happen like it should.
I am a vapor, as nothing, in the big scheme of life. I have power over no other soul but my own. Self-reflection can be a cruel and depressing activity, but I am plummeted into more times than I wish- this summer especially- as my young adult children are reforming me- transforming me-  as a mother- as a woman- without even realizing it.
I give up my self-created, self-ambitious, wanting great success for each of my children in the way I imagine success to be,  time line. I embrace the unknown, the spontaneous, the vastly obscure roads my children choose to take.
Stillness in the midst of change. 

Strange How It Is

My carefully laid plans for my children's future seem to never reach the shore of my dreams. I imagine how each of my children will become who I dream for them to become, and yet they each find a small road I never noticed and choose to start their own, private journey on that obscure way. It is indeed strange to me how life can wrap you the gift of a child so perfectly and delicately just so, hand it to you, and the time comes that you are powerless as to the outcome of the fate of that gift. Training seems to have failed at times, and I often wonder if anything I have said in the past rests in any of the children's minds. I wake at night and seem to watch the years go by in the quick moment of a thought, and I see myself laboring for the good of these little ones. But now that I look up to the oldest, who's head is close to a foot taller than my own, and he looks down on me, lost in this world and unable to decipher where his road is leading him, it is strange for me to look up to my child and say the same words I have been saying to him all his life, but this time those words seem to roll off his mind and I am, again, out of touch.

I see life as being like a river that has its loops across the landscape of the years. I think in times when the young man seems to have forgotten the lessons learned in childhood, he must be on a straight, still watered, restful portion of the water. I am waiting for that loop to come into his life, where he can again remember those moments when the mind connected with the lesson and he will grow before entering the straight river's waters again.

A young woman has the wonderful power of capturing a young man's mind and leading him down any road she chooses, and he just follows, giving no thought if it is in his best interest. Her smell, her giggle, her energy and playfulness are enough for a young man to abandon his own dreams to follow behind. So often once matrimony is entered into, he then, too late, realizes what has happened and bemoans all his married life his dreams left by his road, sometimes never to be realized.

My dreams for my children that I so untiringly and faithfully worked toward seem to be crumbling more with each passing day. So now I am faced with a challenge. To let go of my cherished dreams I had for them, or to keep pressing those dreams on my child, driving him further away. It is strange how it never seems to be what I thought it would be. It keeps me flexible and in a state of just enough unrest that I can stay amiable in life, my life; strange how it is.

Lingering

Tonight I have our 3 younger girls cleaning their room, the boys are each in their own rooms, my husband is researching beetle kill and the current High Park fire in Larimer county, and I want to take a few moments to reflect. Father's Day is today. We took the kids to Manitou Springs yesterday and stayed the night in a simple hotel room. Today we went to old town to have our pictures taken in the old fashioned style of the roaring 20s. After coming home this afternoon and eating with the kids, my husband and myself joined my father in law, mother in law and sister in law at Olive Garden for their dinner. As we left the restaurant, my husband and his family stood in the circle the way they always do before leaving somewhere together, or before saying goodbye, and talked. A family conversation filled with comments, pauses, questions, jokes, more pauses, and many moments of lingering.
This is a family trait of my husband's that has been very difficult for me to adapt to, this lingering. A brief, sometimes uncomfortable silence when no one says anything, but you hear an occasional "mmm" or a sound signifying you are still thinking about what was just said a moment ago. It has been a time of intense discomfort for me, as I am always one who naturally has to have planned in my head what I am going to say next. Lingering takes that planned advancement of conversation away. It settles heavy if you are like me and not used to just being present in a social situation.
I am learning, from my husband's family, to linger and enjoy just the essence of being with loved ones. Words are not what always binds us together, nor is a mind that is actively trying to conjure up worthless things to say to avoid the silence. I have learned to find comfort and acceptance in that silence.
I practice this lingering technique wherever I am now; with another woman who I naturally feel uncomfortable with, while talking on the phone, (which I avoid as much as possible), while listening to my husband talk about his day, or my children sharing an experience. I linger now just being in the presence of others, sensing the atmosphere surrounding us and learning more than I ever could by talking.
Silence is golden. I am now partaking of that gold.

Under the Sun

All things come to all that live under the sun. Whether the days are spent in doing good, or doing evil, the rain falls on both alike. Justice does not always come speedily. In fact, justice runs from duty and finds reason to pass over the guilty. The innocent that have had to learn to accept their lot find that simple acknowledgement of the wrong done to them can be found no where in this living land. The rain and the sun to each alike, when the rain should wash and the sun should burn those who take into their hands the delicate life of another and smother it. But in this life we live by contrasts; we learn to ignore the painful words, remembering that we, too, have spoken curses to others. We learn to bless those that hurt us, to offer grace instead of threats, to extend a hand in friendship and forgiveness to one who has cast away our confidence in them. We take in again one who has deserted us; we learn to look beyond the external to the deep, human nature and the heart of all. Instead of wishing devastation for the wrong done to us, it brings healing to pray for gifts to be showered down on the one who has done the wrong. And where does the injured find their peace? Where in this land, shared by all, can trust be found again? Is there a fountain of healing, an oasis in this desert? In being trustworthy, we find the strength to trust again. In loving, we find the will to extend grace. In forgiving ourselves, we find we can offer that shaky, unsure, sometimes bitter hand to the one who has hurt us, and we  learn to forgive others. Life is full of dark and light to all.

Even in this, I find that we do well to seek justice, to bless others in thoughtful acts of caring, to remember our days are judged by One who is altogether lovely; who sees the things done in secret, who has perfect and unerring judgment; who's love for the human race extends any love we have known. And by Him all things will be made right; no evil work will be filed away in a cabinet and forgotten. He will avenge His own, and our hope can be safely rested in this. The works of man will one day be judged and awarded accordingly. Let us give this work to our Creator, then, and seek to win the very ones who have torn away our confidence in the goodness of the human race. Our days will be filled with thunder and floods, with dry, scorching heat, and with the uncertainty of living. Throw our confidence to heaven, then, and know this is a land we quickly pass through. We will soon go home. A home where the sun always shines.

The Prelude

It won't be too long before my children are scattered abroad on soil near and far to each find a new place to plant themselves. They will each adopt their own, custom picked families and communities. They will transform into a man or woman with distinct differences from their siblings. They may cherish values they were raised with and embrace some that were not from their early childhood training,  based on what feels right for them at the moment. I may disagree with choices in friendships or mates; I may wish for more devotion to be seen, or a particular focus to be cultivated. But in the humbleness that naturally comes with being a mother, my variance toward their personal choices must be soothed in the mind set of acceptance. 

The faster my children grow into independence, and the more mellow I become, I learn not to turn the heads of my children to see as I see. I am learning to take in the world even as that one child might be experiencing it. As I give up my narrow beliefs of how it has to be, and allow life to naturally and gently lead me, I gain an insight I would never have had by trying to unduly bend the ways of my children.
As the years dance on I celebrate the slow, ever steady process of growth. I dedicate this blog site to share the charming, sometimes frightening, journeys of my life. Maybe, also, to plant myself within a community all my own so as not to be left behind.