What I am learning in a season of change
Is there some freewheeling watcher
Shooting marbles in the sky?
Holding your years between their fingers
Watching it burn till the fire dies
Brandi Carlisle’s hauntingly beautiful new song, “Returning to Myself,” is the perfectly moody song for mothers whose children are growing up.
O, my darlings, how I love you
I love you and you and you
And returning to myself is such a lonely thing to do
Here I am, listening to Brandi Carlisle on repeat, waiting in the school pickup line for my son Luke, who is in fifth grade and attending brick and mortar school for the first time. It’s only been a few weeks since school started, and I miss having my kids at home with me. Alone in my car, I agree with Brandi—returning to myself is boring and it hurts.
The years of young motherhood feel like they’ve burned away like a match. I am tempted to think that God is watching me struggle through this season of change like some freewheeling watcher.
This fall has been full of transitions for our family. My oldest daughter Natalie graduated from high school in the spring and moved away to college at the end of August. My sons Jack and Luke started school for the first time in seventh and fifth grade after being homeschooled since preschool. My middle daughter Zoe is continuing at the same high school that she has attended for the last two years, but as a junior, she is also starting to look forward to what comes next after high school. I wonder if we will ever have as much fun as a family as we did when all the kids were home. Is this what Robert Frost meant when he said, “Nothing gold can stay”?
“Life is like a stone / Only skipping for a time,” Brandi Carlisle sings. It is the shortness of everything, especially my children’s growing up years, that I am grieving.
Three thousand years ago, similarly facing the brevity of life, Moses prayed, “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). As I am adjusting to the new rhythms of this fall and encouraging my kids as they are also adjusting, I’ve been asking, what does wisdom teach us about our days? What does wisdom teach us about seasons of change?
Zach Eswine’s little book about Proverbs, Wiser with Jesus, has been so comforting to me. Eswine says, “A God-inhabited story of time means that every second has a sanctuary with God waiting for you within it” (158). Wisdom teaches us that our lives are written in chapters, and God is there with us in every phrase, every sentence, every paragraph. Eswine’s book helps me name the season I am in, a season of change, a season of both loss and new beginnings.
In Ecclesiastes, Solomon reminds us that God has made everything beautiful in its time, and there is a season for everything. Eswine expands on Solomon’s insights–when we fail to recognize and live within the constraints and opportunities of new seasons as they come, we can become season-jumpers (living in the future), season-clingers (living in the past), or season-erasers (completely untethered from time) (162). A gift of faith is that God meets us in the present. When we jump or cling or erase our season, we miss the beauty of the chapter we are in, and we risk missing God’s presence in it.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been season-clinging. I know it’s okay to be sad when one season ends. But there is also a letting go that needs to happen for the new season to truly begin. It is like when Jesus says, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). A seed has to die so that new fruit can grow. And new fruit is what I want, fruit in my children’s lives and my own.
Letting go lets me look back on the years my kids were at home with a lot of fond memories, joy, and thankfulness, and it also helps me see that my feelings are mixed with some regret and sadness for opportunities I missed that will never come again.
When I miss my kids, it is good to remember that God understands my heart as a mother. “Can a woman forget her nursing child,” God says to his people in the book of Isaiah, “that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands” (Isaiah 49:15-16).
Through the joys and sorrows of motherhood, God is parenting me. As Eswine writes, echoing Psalm 31:15, “My times, all of them, are held within God’s hands” (158). When I am tempted to cling to past seasons, it fills me with awe to know that my name and the names of my children are tattooed on God’s hands. That God gathers up all our seasons in his hands. I still miss them, but I am less regretful and more hopeful in my missing.
To be continued . . .
