What Is This Love, But One Long Leaving

Yesterday I needed help to reach something. For the first time I didn’t ask my husband. I asked my oldest son. He just turned 13 and is finally taller than me.

He’s been waiting for this moment. For months we’ve been standing back to back, running our hands over the place where our two heads meet. We’ve penciled lines onto walls, pressed up against a tape measure that won’t keep still, and cried foul at each other’s straining and tip-toeing strategies.

I don’t know what this means to him, after waiting so long for it. I don’t remember the day I grew taller than my own parents. But I see in him a kind of victory and pride, inflated no doubt by my playful insistence that he stay small forever.

All I can think about are those tiny feet, his first laugh, and how he surprised me one day with the word ‘red’. What a joy as they start to move, and speak and enjoy the world. What heartache when they feel hurt by it.

What is all this, their growing up, if not a long leaving? Even when they are young, when they are always close, they are stretching out, becoming more of themselves and ever so slightly less of us. It is a beautiful, painful, incomprehensible thing.

Yet I know the profound joy of being a human, of being an adult, knowing I am whole and complete. I know the thrill of understanding what is possible in a life, of creating life. I adore the feeling of interconnection and belonging in the world.

This is where they are going—toward independence, hopefully taking a love of interdependence with them. This is why I asked my son to reach the thing I could not. To see him stretch. To make the moment he finally outgrew me to be about his gain, and not my loss. To let him be the one to help me. To begin a new way of being together.

Here are two poems from Lullaby for Mothers—Limbs and Calling Out. Both of them speak to these moments of our child’s growing, and our letting go. I’m so grateful that I wrote these poems, and captured the moment, the feeling, in writing.

Would you like to write your own poem, capture your own moment?

I am offering the first ever live round of “A Moment in Time” (my ‘write your own poem’ course) in late April/May. I invite you to join the mailing list to receive the details when registration is open.