note: I’m working on answering comments.  Have been up to my neck in storage boxes –

Two days.  Two days to finish two years and four days’ service.  The mother, sitting in her corner of the couch, trying not to think to hard about Tuesday.  Because she is one of those people who, while being willing to hope, still refuses to expect anything good to happen till it actually does.

Last Monday, we emailed back and forth with Murph for the last missionary time.  I have to tell you this: he did not leave The Girl behind when he went.  Brought up by too many tough women to be quite that romantic and silly (I say this in the face of the fact that Kyle and J are now quite nicely married).  Instead, he left friends behind, several of whom were indeed married almost right away.  There were maybe three or four girls he left, thinking about with anything like serious interest.  A couple have written faithfully.  The others fell by the wayside as the months rolled by, just fading into silence.

On Monday, he remarked (a little glumly if I read the slant of his font right) that he now knows what happened to one of those faders: he had just gotten his copy of the LDS Church magazine (circulation in the millions, every language on the planet – or close), the General Conference edition.  And as he read through it – well, well – there was an actual candid photograph of this girl up at Temple Square, all sort of snuggled up to SOMEBODY ELSE.

Whew – I mean, what if she’d written him a Dear John? (What was my punctuation idea for irony? @@?)

The rest of Monday, I took a break from the endless schlepping around and organizing of all our belongings and sat at the computer, schlepping and organizing my genealogy files – some of which had twenty three duplicates that had been chucked into folders everywhere.  The day went quickly: hours of comparing all those files, name by name, to find the most recent, up-to-date file?  Now that was fun.  When I finished, though, I had one neat file folder and one copy of each working study file. Clean as a whistle.  Desktop organized.

I was looking at that nice, neat list of files when I had this vision of cleaning up my house the same way – one simple series of keystrokes here, and suddenly—massive things shifting themselves from room to room upstairs.  Hit delete, boxes of junk simply poof out of existence.  And each thing in each box sorted and listed, complete with origination date.

I like that.  I like imagining books and beds and boxes of holiday decorations just whooshing through the air, up and down the stairs.  And all those things of Chaz’, the part left over from her last bout of living in the family homestead – the eight hours worth (that was Friday) of treasures and books and furniture and stuffed animals and games and artwork crammed into my spare room? They’d have organized themselves into all those boxes and flown down the stairs, out the front door, to the west a block, the south another block – across the busy street, then south and west again, up her walk and through her front door, to stack themselves neatly in her blue and yellow spare bedroom.

I was tired Monday when I finally tucked the horses into the barn.  But I felt like I had actually done something.  Moved the world.  Dusted off my hands, palm to palm, ready for an evening’s shower, food and story before bed.

Today, I am thinking a little about post—missionum depression.  Which I have never actually experienced, but which is a real thing in our culture; there are internet support groups for it.  I’m talking about the classic LDS mission, here, but the support groups are not for the actual missionaries.  They’re for the moms.

I’ve seen it before: the mom, waiting and waiting for the Big Day of Return.  Visions of the New Kid dancing in her head: she sent away a boy (or girl); what she expects to get back is a best friend, now spiritually and emotionally rounded out.  Changed.  Morphed into an adult chum who still retains all those endearing child characteristics—like loving to be home, wanting to sit down with the family for dinner—wanting to hang with Mom.

Why any such picture should form in any mother’s head puzzles me.  Don’t kids pretty much mentally leave home just about the day they turn sixteen and inherit car keys?

What the missionary mom does get back, if the mission has been lived to its full usefulness, is indeed a grown-up person who has been living independently, cooking for him/herself, taking care of laundry, budgeting, used to intense focus on the business at hand – coming and going as inspired.  A person with focus, discipline, needing a job to do.  (A job that does not require the hovering mom.)  And the job now facing that missionary is getting on with adult life.

So the mother is often left a little slack jawed as the former missionary jumps into the car and takes off to find old friends and sign up for college.  Home for ten minutes—a couple of great hugs and the recitation of a few choice stories later—a cloud of dust, headed off for the horizon.

In thinking about this, I wonder if some mothers, over that long two years, might have begun to attribute their personal restlessness or sense of life-dieorrientation to the absence of that beloved child.  If, in the last few months especially, the mother might start packing up everything that isn’t quite right in her life—everything off balance or short-of-finished, or unsatisfying—into one unhappy little missing-the-kid box, sure that surely All Will Finally Be Made Right the day that kid walks back through the front door.

That’s just as stupid as any of those “Things will go back to normal once . . .” things:  after the baby is born, the tax return comes, the audit is over, the spring finally gets here, we get moved, school is out, we get the job.

You and I know that sheer plod it is what makes plow-down sillion shine, right? (Allusion?)

Anyway.  I was just thinking about that.

G and I have spent the last few weeks trying to put all the pieces back together so everything would be in balance BEFORE Murph gets home.  That way, when he jumps into the car and disappears forever into the animation lab and then gets married and moves away to California, we’ll still have this cool, cleaned up, revitalized house to comfort us.  Kind of like an insurance policy.  Because once he gets his own house, we’re done.  Kids flown.  Our own lives staring back at us – our own post-mission life to build.

Still, you’re never safe, as clever and wise as you think you’re being: who knows if he’ll make his flight connections?  (Sad, sad picture: the little family waiting in the terminal, still checking their watches as the last bag is pulled off the flight carousel.)

And in the end—after all this closet cleaning, and cabinet organizing and shelf building, you know I’m going to have to go through every box in every one of those new cabinets, looking for my toothbrush.