The Obstacles Might Be Tremendous

Hi Reader Friends.

I’m in Montana, waiting while my daughter sleeps, to begin a new day here in sweet Bozeman. It looks to have changed a bit since I was last here, with my son, when he was a junior at MSU six years ago. He got married in Minnesota last week, and this week his sister starts college at his alma mater.

That’s a big, bulbous circle of joy and pain for this mamma.

I think there were some grammatical errors back there, but the coffee I’m drinking sucks and my head is in a sickness fog.

Nate and his wife (!!) met here at Montana State. Now Coco is going to be a freshman and in a couple of days I’ll have to do that thing again where I head back east, far from my mini-me, with a newly-minted daughter-in-law.

Here is one true thing about being a mom: you have to figure out how to hold opposites in your body, mind and heart, all the time. From the get-go you are completely exhausted from the process of building and ejecting another human. And you are also insanely in awe and madly in love with the little thing. Then you have to keep a 7-pound human being alive and they eat all the time and you are the food source. And you want your life back and you want to complete a sentence and see your friends and your boobs are bigger than the world and constantly leaking milk. You are tired and raw and you love it and hate it all at the same time.

I am twenty-eight years into this and I will tell you, it doesn’t get any easier.

They pair up and you love the new person and you are amazed when you watch them together. And you miss what you had when they were yours alone. They go far away from home and you are so proud they can survive out there. And you just want them back under the same roof so you know they are safe and cozy and well-fed and warm.

Motherhood most definitely is the microcosm for all of life: it’s so awful and so tremendously fantastic at the same time. People are mean and self-involved and the sunrise gets you every time. There is war and hate and lilacs and grandmothers.

Last week I watched all three of my kids dance and give toasts and get tipsy and love each other at Nate’s wedding. They were surrounded by cousins and aunts, uncles, grandparents. It’s gonna take weeks for all of the dust to settle around how magical the whole thing was. These kids love each other so much!

I don’t think, quite honestly, that I have ever seen my son quite so happy as he was on his wedding day. I officiated, which was yet another opportunity for my heart to explode with both joy and sorrow.

In the days leading up to his wedding I kept seeing visions of him like this:

And I thought for sure I would completely lose my sh*t trying to get through the ceremony.

But I didn’t, largely because I know these two clowns to be supremely happy and well-matched.

I guess life is just one big, long series of letting go’s, isn’t it? Let go, let go, let go. You have to trust in the unseen forces that love and guide us all along the way. Van sings it really well …

Yea, the obstacles might be tremendous, but there are guides and spirits all along the way who will befriend us.

I gotta trust this today when we unload this one’s packed car into her little room in the very same dorm where we unloaded Nate eight years ago.

How do we do this? I don’t know. Someone built the human heart to last, that’s for sure. I’ll be leaning heavily on that later today.

Be kind to each other, please. And love each other a lot, because it all goes by so very, very fast. xomo