The Cost of Moving on –

            I don’t know how many people will understand this.  I have been mocked before for waxing sentimental about my children. I wasn’t really that interested in having any in the first place, you know.  Oh, I was into the concept—but my babysitting experience hadn’t left me deliriously happy at the thought of actually having to live with children – little children – full time.  Nothing had prepared me for the kind of connection I found with Gin—oh, it took me some days before I could translate the little lump of sleeping baby into what she actually was.  But once I figured it out, my heart was lost forever.  “I’m so in love with this baby,” my friend, Meridee, said, each time she had one.  And yes, I was so in love with those babies.

            Not with babies in general, understand.  With my babies.

            I had planned to put the “nursery” waaaay down the hall so that no crying babies would bother my sleep.  Instead, we slept them in our room for the first many months, first in the borrowed white and yellow bassinet. Then in the crib.  I was terrified of SIDS.  So, for several months, I’d sleep so that I could reach out and touch a baby in the night, just to make sure.  This is how I know that tiny babies dream, and that they have a sense of humor.  Because they used to wake me, laughing in their sleep.

            The day we’d finally move one out into his or her real bedroom was always a tough one for me.  Every day back then was tough—like I got a new baby each day, and lost the old one, they changed so fast; the little heartbreakingly charming things they’d done for days, suddenly dropped for other, equally heartbreaking things.  We tried to catch all of it on film—each passing baby.  Maybe we did catch some of it—but even at that time, what made it to film or video was a thin likeness of the original.

            When the day came for us to move Murphy’s crib out, I did it myself.  Knew it was time.  Dismantled the thing screw by screw, fall the time iercely silent, literally grieving.  He was the last of them.  This was a door closed.  I grieved for three days, and then I got on with things.  In the end, you always have to get on with things.  But I still remember it, that feeling that something was gone.

            Today, there is an envelope, presented in state on a glass platter, on the tidy dining room table, waiting for Murphy to come home.  It’s a glorious, large envelope, simple and white, with a Salt Lake post mark.  I have not opened it.  I have not even been tempted to open it.  It is his mission call.

            It’s the last of the last.  In it is folded my fate for the next two years.  A target for my fledgling’s first real solo.  The mark between what has been a beautiful and deeply engrossing life—and the rest of my life. 

Today, Murphy becomes a man.

            “Isn’t this exciting?” dear friends say.  And, of course, it is.  It is.  But it is also painful.  I know my faith by the way I am not pulling my hair, running around the house, keening—by the way I am willing to abide by what’s written inside.  The problem with raising children to be your friends is that they are a changeable feast.  Glorious while you have it, all the more smarting at the loss of it.  He is at the point where he can’t go home again (thank you, Mr. Wolf); hs own life has started.

            I would wear them all like wallpaper, these kids, these friends of my heart.  Like air in my face.  Taken for granted as eternal.  Laughter in the air like morning light. Popping, glorious synergy.

            Sad and glorious.  How odd life is.