August is a glorious month filled with picnics and sunshine. Except. For a few, August is wrenching and painful. I’m thinking about moms today. Moms who have spent the last nineteen or so years of their lives devoted mainly to one thing: raising their babies. Moms who are this month caught up in the pride and excitement and joy of outfitting their youngest child with comforters and towel sets, a great wardrobe, books, and lessons on budgeting while fighting the silent pain of saying goodbye.
You can tell yourself over and over how happy you are for your daughter, whose eyes are filled with the future and the college of her aspirations, but when she finally drives away, or walks through security without you, there are absolutely no words to describe the desolation a mom is left with. And yes, if a mom has been through this with her older children, she understands a bit of that pain, but no mom, no matter how prepared she thinks she is, is quite ready for what she feels when the youngest leaves.
My heart remembers the emptiness of rooms, the quiet of evenings, the grievous sanity of mornings without chaos or last minute lost homework, the blankness of the family calendar. Budget hours for laundry only to find it is done without a blink. Buy your usual amount of cookies, or chips, or those certain cheese sticks she loves, then watch them pile up, uneaten in the fridge. Quiet reigns – becomes your nemesis. There’s no PTA meeting to rush to, no bleacher or theater seat waiting for you. Now you have time to bewail the fact that she is gone, and that all your babies have flown, and the hole in your heart and your days becomes a vast universe of emptiness. You ask yourself: Who am I now, after I’ve given everything to be the best mom I can be and now when that’s no longer who I am?
To the mom out there who will watch her last fledgling fly this month, please know I am praying for you, thinking often of you. It will get easier. The pain will ease. As Gramma would say, “This, too, shall pass.”
