Something's missing, something's found

Life seems strange nowadays.  In cold rational figures, 20% of our family is missing: one-fifth, one out of five.  The daily pattern has the same rythm, sunrise to sunset and beyond, but the resonance has changed.

I ponder this, and it occurs to me that this is yet another way that marriage and family show  facet of God to us.  The strange gap within me at the departure of a child is somehow reflective of what God feels as His children grow and move forward in their lives.  Our children grow up and grow out of the family home, and both the parents and children feel the absence of each other. No matter that the separation is natural, is a good in itself as it allows each to grow further into the person God made us to be. There is a hole inside the parent, and the child feels a chill as she is now exposed to the world.

I struggle to describe this reality, and it remains a mystery.  Only God truly knows how I feel now, and He has the same experience as every one of His children goes out into the world, a world with dangers and delights that only He is completely aware of.

And He has also been the child, our Lord Jesus. God chose to separate the Word from the Trinity and become Man. He was born, grew, left home. All these things, God experienced as a human Child and then a Man. Jesus walked the world away from His home, walked among people and in places and into danger, finally even death.

As I think on this, I realize that the emptiness within me is now a place where God can reach further into my soul, bringing me closer to Him and His understanding of the world. The hole is still there, but the edges have been gilt.

Why can't Mommy write?

To start with, "Mommy" is usually the title that a mother has when her kids are very young, with free moments snatched in between snacks and baths and meals and bedtime, between booboos and tantrums.  Mommy can't write because Mommy has trouble getting more that 24 characters down onto a page over a two week period.

"Mom" is the title I currently carry. My youngest kids are sophomores (yes, twins, which is another reason Mommy can't write) and my oldest is now in college. Mom now has great swathes of free time, spreading like a blanket of fog over San Francisco in the summer, lasting for days and only occasionally being blown away by the inland breeze of motherhood.

I seem to have entered that time of life I expected to occur last year, the year everything was supposed to change. But it didn't. The expected changes didn't arrive. Instead everyone worked through the same year as the previous one, only concentrated. Distilled. Freshman year for the twins was almost a repeat of their older sister's freshman year - a joyful romp with moments of incredible angst. Senior year repeated half the joys and all the trauma of junior year, with more intensity. My role continued in "listen, and make dinner" mode with a dash of personal misery thrown in, yet even the misery repeated the pattern from a few years ago. "Ok, guess I had mistaken expectations," said I to myself. No-one else really pays attention to me if they can help it.

And now, BOOM, after having lulled myself into expectations of doldrums, the weather has changed. College has happened at last and the dominant personality relocated to a different climate zone. The twins have drifted into different social patterns, and teacher-Dad has less pushing him to leave school at the earliest moment. My role is still to listen and make dinner, but the listening is much less frequent, and as soon as they serve themselves dinner they retreat back into their bedrooms, the twins to do homework and teacher-Dad to nap.

So I have more time alone, to myself. Mornings can provide 90 minutes of reflection, if I wake up as they depart. And after work I can have as much as three hours to myself, even more if I make dinner as soon as I get home so they can get their food and separate into their personal spaces immediately.

So, why do I not write?