Here we go

Hey, Little Boy.

Here you go. Well, actually here we go. It's time. It seems exactly right and also impossibly wrong. 

Who am I to hold you here? To wish back time? Who am I to wring my hands? Who am I to oppose or even to endorse your path from here on out? Is your one wild and precious life even any of my business anymore?

This life. Meant for you. Created for you. It is a life meant and created for you apart from me. On certain days I find this to be a terrible plan. It's infuriating, frankly. But on other days, I know better. There's a popular saying that having a child is like having your heart walk around outside your body. I understand the feeling. But feelings aren't truth. The truth is that you are not me. You are you - on your own  - uniquely individual. We've known that from the jump, kid.

Those little chubby fingers that I held so tight are meant to be wrestled away. 

"I do it myself," you would say.

So now, you will. 

And so will I. I will have to pull my hand away from yours. I've been working on it for awhile now. Your big brothers helped set me up for this. But this time is different. Sorry, man. While there are a lot of advantages to being the last one, I guess you drew the short straw in this case. Tomorrow is a big day for you. And as it turns out, it's a pretty big day for me, too.

I have so many images of you in my mind. Curled up on the sofa watching Curious George. Pushing the kitchen table chairs to the counter so you could climb up. Throwing tantrums the likes of which I had never seen. Stomping around in your brother's three sizes-too-big-for-you baseball cleats.

But the image that came to me this morning was when I looked over at you in the passenger seat of my car last fall. We were driving home from a baseball tournament. We were ticking those weekend tournaments off one by one - after years and years of them there were only a few more road trips and fast food stops and musty hotel rooms and game delays and washing uniforms in the bathtub left for the two of us. You had fallen asleep and I could barely make out the chubby freckled baby cheeks under the grown man's face that slumped toward the window. The song Landslide came on the radio and since I'm apparently a glutton for punishment, I didn't change the station.

I've been afraid of changing 'cause I built my life around you.

It's not very "2023" for a woman to admit that she built her life around her children. You know, Girl Power and all that. We are supposed to have bigger dreams than having a mess of babies, cooking dinners, managing laundry, attending Back to School Nights, reading The Hungry Caterpillar seventeen times in a row and signing up for working in the concession stand on Game Day.

But you? You and your brothers and your dad? This life I've built around the four of you is the dream come true. There was nothing in the whole world I wanted more than this. That's the entire truth and I don't have a shred of regret or shame about it. 

I have had and do have other dreams. Writing and traveling and serving and speaking and maybe some dreams that I haven't even come up with yet. For both of us, new dreams will keep coming if we allow ourselves to listen and look for them. If we remember that God woke us up today on purpose, for purpose, then there's always something more He wants us to do. So now we stand at the end of one season and wait to see what the next one requires of us.

And listen, I'm gonna try real hard not to be a complete disaster tomorrow. I mean, odds are good that it could be totally fine. You've done a bang-up job of getting on my nerves this week. Leaving your crap everywhere. Staying out too late. Telling me even after I just got back from the grocery store, "Ma, there's no food in the crib". Texting me from your bedroom to ask if I could change your laundry. Nice strategy, bud. 

But even as I write all of this, another image of you comes to mind and it's not of the frustrating, messy teenager that I rolled my eyes at all week. 

I always said that you came to complete our family. That God knew we needed this one more boy. And it turns out, that it is you who I needed specifically in the hardest moment of my life. 

When I got the phone call that Grammy had died on that Monday morning in March, Dad. Joe and Kyle were all out of town. But you were there. You were mere minutes from walking out the door to school, but you hadn't left yet. And I'm certain you wish that one of the other guys would have been there to at least shoulder some of that burden with you. 

But you, my littlest boy. You didn't falter. It was you. You, who ran to my side as I sunk to the floor. You, who knelt down and wrapped your strong arms around me as I screamed and sobbed into your shoulder. I remember the navy sleeves of your tee shirt. I remember your steady breath in my ear. I remember the powerful grip you kept on me to hold me upright. 

I've thought back to those moments many times in the last four months, wishing that I could have spared you that scene. But in the end, it is clear to me that it is you who God meant to be with me on that morning. I suppose He knew it all along. And I think you learned something about yourself that day. In the last few years you've been incredibly disciplined to work out every single day to become stronger. And that day you were as steady and strong as any grown man could be  - both physically and emotionally. While I was certainly overwhelmed by sorrow and pain that morning, at the same time I distinctly remember feeling enormous gratitude and pride in the man God had made you to be . . .a man of character and of more compassion than I ever could have prayed for.

I wish that these two seasons - the painful one of losing my mom and the exciting one of your graduation and going off to college to study and play baseball - didn't have to happen at the same time. Maybe I won't always link the two together, but it seems that this is how life works. Triumph and tragedy don't always line up their schedules conveniently. Oftentimes they show up at the same time. I guess that's as good a lesson to learn as any other. So here we go, off to meet triumph and tragedy, grief and gratitude and whatever else this beautiful, brutal life has to hand to us.

 Can I sail through the changing ocean tides? Can I handle the seasons of my life?

You and me? We got this. Let's keep sailing through. I think the sun coming up on the horizon for both of us is gonna be pretty bright. I love you, Drew Christopher Skinner.