letting go

last weekend we went to california with the three little pigs and zoe was in boston visiting with my parents who had come to town. when we got back, she was waiting for us at home and we had a couple of days together before we brought her back to her school.

i've noticed that despite how good she sounds when she is at school and how well she manages to get things done with her daily hygiene routine, on home visits it's different. it feels a lot like how it used to feel. old habits die hard. the patterns are there like old slippers. "it's normal for mom to ask 12 times for me to take a shower".

this may be very typical. may be most 20 year olds go off to college and mature but then when they come home, they regress to their early high-school version of themselves. it was still a good visit, but it reminded me of how taxing it was all the time to be such a nag.

she went back to school on monday. it's now thursday afternoon.  we usually talk everyday but she didn't call on monday evening or tuesday. then she didn't call on wednesday. we decided that we should respect her boundaries and wait for her call us when she is ready. we know she will call if things are going badly. with zoe, no news really is good news.

but today it was a blustery day- fall and rainy and windy and it reminded me so much of winnie-the-pooh that all i could think about was zoe who loves a.a. milne. so i wrote her a letter and put it in the mail. but after a few hours i was just dying to call her so i did. i just missed her so much.

there is something about zoe. her expressions. her predictability. her intonation. i just love that girl. when i called the phones weren't working properly so i couldn't speak with her but they said she'd call me back and she did.

she sounded amazing. "hey mom! i've got some great news!" and carried on with what's been happening the past few days. we got disconnected because of the blustery weather and she called her dad's cell phone and offered an unsolicited apology for how she had acted over the weekend, with needing a million reminders to do her stuff.

the whole thing was a lesson to me in the importance of letting go. again.  a lesson that God has been trying to teach me for decades. letting go of expectations. letting go of my idea of how things should be. letting go of zoe. letting her go off and be herself, with her friends and not tying her to myself even by daily phone calls. 

my gut told me over a year ago that she needed to be pushed out of the nest. but every other part of me clung to her. it has been a process of prying myself away from her, often when even she didn't want me to go, to respect what my gut knew was the right thing. i would hear these whispers, 'she's God's child' and i would see that we (mike and i) had hit a wall. we had reached a point where we were enabling her helplessness.

love can be so big and mushy and blinding.

i just re-read the post far.it reminds me that there are seasons and of how far we have come. there were many years of falling apart together. of meltdowns and tears and anger and words and rubbing backs while falling asleep. years when we needed to be with her in the intensity of what she was going through. when we needed to speak words of life to her, when we needed to be the balance that she couldn't find. this was especially important when we were in africa with her and there wasn't a lot of other support.

at the end of that post (far) i came to the conclusion that it's not about fighting what i don't want my life, our life to be and worrying about how far we've come or not come; it's about being in my life and becoming who i am supposed to be in this life, as it is, in it's perfect messy disastrous bliss. and i can see how far i've come in my acceptance of my life, in my ability to "be" in my life.

this season that we are in now is another version of that. i'm learning to be in my life in a new way. i'm seeing my beautiful daughter learn to be in her life in a new way too. i'm so incredibly proud of her. more proud of her than i could imagine. she has "flown the coop" as she says. and she's doing it. and in this bit of distance, we are learning to love each other better.

i know i have to prepare myself. this is the beginning of a lot more. i have to get ready  for being a lot farther away than an hour drive. i know i have to prepare myself to go for many months without giving her a big hug. 

this is the letting go. the amazing, once-never imagined, look- how - far- we've- all-come- letting go.