On grieving, growing up, and living wide awake

I pull down the D. 

Oh God.  Breath catches. Eyes fill. Why is this so hard?

This was what I hoped for, for them ready to have their own space, for this next step. In a world that hurries childhood and pushes independence prematurely, I didn’t want to. Why not let them be little? They loved sharing their small room, both beds squeezed in and their own messy-lovely artwork Scotch-taped all over the walls. So often I’d asked if they were ready to move on and their response was always, “Never! We always want to share a room.” I knew when it was time we would know.

And now they’d initiated it–maybe Dutch could have the guest room? Dutch, 8, suddenly shifted into boyhood and his “Pattersonian lab” and sprouts growing along sills and telescope perched precariously and waist-high stack of encyclopedia–more and more he craved a special space just his own. A place to sit quiet and read and dream and think.

I get it. A room of one’s own. 

But now it swirled all around me, how much they’ve grown. Already. And as I took his letters down from the wall, one by one, D-U-T-C-H, I remembered how I’d made them almost 8 years ago, mod-podged the paper on to look like ocean waves.

I carry the letters into his new room and find him lost in thought, carefully putting all his favorite things in place. Up until now, I’ve arranged his room. Decorated it.

Up until now, he was really just a little boy extension of me. But now he’s something else.

He is his own man-child self, apart from me.

I stop in the hall, silent, just to watch him. The ceiling of his small room slopes down low on one side. That must be why he looks so tall, I think to myself. But I glance down at his high-water sweatpants and smile.

Nope.

He looks tall because he’s getting tall. And he’s in this room because he’s growing up. 

That night I go out with some girlfriends and one of them is planning her son’s 18th birthday and his graduation party.

I think about pulling the D off the wall. I know I’ll blink and be in her shoes. How do you do it? we ask her. How do you handle the letting go? 

“Grieve every stage,” she says. “At every single stage, embrace it, enjoy it, celebrate it, then when it’s over … grieve it.”

Yes. Isn’t that it? Inhaling every season, soaking in it, savoring it, living wide awake to it, then grieving when it’s gone, eyes wide open for whatever glorious good the Giver will gift us with next.

Later, late, I slip back into the dark house and quietly creep upstairs. There at the end of the hall, in his new room, his reading light is still on, an encyclopedia still open, but he’s sound asleep.

I lean down, close in, and kiss his sleeping face. Forehead, cheeks, chin, and silently say goodbye to yesteryear, asking God for grace to grieve each glorious phase and bravely, joyfully, embrace each new one as it comes. I look up and Jeff is standing at the door, smiling.

I pull Dutch’s quilt up over his shoulders, tuck it under his chin, switch off the lamp. Jeff takes my hand in the darkness and we tiptoe back to our bedroom.

I’m glad for sleep, and for living wide awake. 

{Thanks for reading.}