Friday, August 9, 2013

A New Thing


Yesterday was my baby's fourteenth birthday. Tomorrow I will be thirty-eight. On Monday my oldest will be seventeen. I don't know how this happened. How I got to this place where my kids are like driftwood being carried out to sea with anticipation, riding the tide to freedom and adventure, where they are tolerant of my neediness, putting in their time with me while looking for their nearest escape to be with normal people, like their friends, or the isolation of their bedrooms. My oldest said yesterday that he is looking forward to going back to school. What? How does this happen? And the most isolating part of it, is that everybody older than me is like, "You're still young. Try being me," and everybody younger is like, "You're not that old. Get over yourself," even though they do think you're kind of old.

Who doesn't want to do something amazing with their life? I think of my uncle who died of cancer at thirty-six when his children were still so small. His life was just getting started. It hardly seems fair. Or a college student I mentored, who died before she could even start a family or her dream of becoming a teacher. Or the mom I know who buried her only daughter after a freak 4th of July accident two summers ago.  Or the star athlete from my son's high school who drowned in a ski jet accident this summer in a family pond.  I think of a widow from church who lost her only son in a car accident years ago. She spent the first half of her life pouring everything she had into him only to put him in the ground. What do you do with the rest of your life after a blow like that? How do you pick up the pieces and start a second life? Two years ago, when I shared that I was grieving the sense of loss for my own children when they moved away to spend the rest of their school years with their dad, that widow said to me, "Honey, you have to let them go." In my mind I won't let her heal. In my mind, life still feels meaningless. In my mind, if her life didn't turn out the way she dreamt it, then why should mine? But she has healed. Somehow. Beyond my comprehension. And she has spent the last half of her life quietly praying, and serving, and giving, and belonging to other people's lives. I think she is amazing.

Who doesn't want to do something amazing with their life? I admire my friend. She knows what she loves. The beach. She got rid of everything she owned, quit her job, and moved to the U.S. Virgin Islands. Yes, she lives modestly--rationing water, and food, and even living space. But she has the daily freedom to meet God in her wide open sanctuary, where she digs her toes into the sand and lets the sunshine lick up all traces of what-if. I think she is amazing.

There is this guy I know. He is an attorney. Just because, somewhere between his education and career, he taught school in Hong Kong or someplace like that. Why not? Well-read. From a well-educated family. You know--the kind who knows something about everything. We really have no idea the advantage our beginnings give us over other people. He intimidates the crap out of me. I wish my brain would work like that. "I'm bored. I think I'll learn Chinese today." I think he is amazing.

Meanwhile, I find myself turning increasingly inward with time, needing less and less of other people. Maybe it's because I have the luxury of people I love coming and going in my life. Maybe it would be different if they were no longer there. I find myself less bored with my own imagination than with the buzz of the television or even reading. I find myself so concerned with wasting time on frivolity, that I do nothing at all. 

Sometimes I paint. It looks like cartoons. Someday they will get ruined in a flooded basement and my children will be relieved of the burden of keeping them. I wouldn't hang them in my house. Why would they? Sometimes I write. My journal will crash with this computer. The unspeakable pages--prayers and dreams and mean thoughts and secrets and regrets, will melt with the plastic. Thank goodness. 

But the plea of my heart today, as I prepare for another year, is that God will do something new in me. I want to be driftwood, soggy with no-regrets. I want my life to be a nugget of inspiration for somebody else. Or at least I want to be one drop of water, okay maybe that drop of water, that sets some other driftwood free from all other debris, and into the sea of becoming.

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