Heartstrings and Havoc

The house is deafeningly quiet and except for the slowly twitching cat’s tail in front of the fireplace, as still as the leaves on a tree before an impending summer storm. My cousin just signed off as we typically do each night via text message with some funny meme or saying that relates to how our day has gone. It’s always nice to know that someone out there across the dark abyss gets your frustration or anger or whatever it is you’re feeling at the moment. The world is such a crazy place these days, seemingly spinning out of control with disease and chaos, a little twisted humor exchanged between us helps to balance out another 24 hours that sometimes seems like it went down the drain. While she’s doing a brilliant job of prioritizing and managing her two boys’ educations at a time when formal schooling somehow seemed to cease to exist overnight, I remind her as she tries to navigate the new normal of homeschool and zoom meetings instead of classrooms, that the days are long but the years are short. Oh, how very short. As I sit inside my very empty nest, I realize just how little a clue I had while in those very same trenches that she is currently finding herself. But I know like me, she is often bone tired and weary with frustration amongst the days where we have no answers as to when our world will right itself and return to normal. Whatever “normal” may be in the future. Sometimes I wish for those days of homework and missing assignments and contradictory instructions from teachers. Albeit the closest I ever came to anything like what’s going on currently was back in 2010 when Snowmageddon smacked the DC region, paralyzing and shutting down everything from schools and beyond for an entire month. At least those days had an element of fun with the massive amounts of snow that didn’t make you fear you would die if you got within six feet of the closest person around. Cooped up inside with rambunctious kids begging to dress up like Eskimos and sled down the front yard hill for the millionth time already instead of finishing up their social studies report or whatever else they were assigned that simply had zero meaning to them at the time, I would yearn for the days to come where the house might be a tad quieter and less frenetic, full of energetic and sometimes less than cooperative offspring. My mom used to say to me with a bit of knowing sarcasm when I had particularly difficult childrearing days, “your children are stepping on your shoelaces now, but one day soon, they will be stepping on your heartstrings.” Actually, I quite often visualized this whole parenting thing as my heart, stripped bare and naked, wandering outside my body in the form of two little people that God entrusted to me if for only a little while. Little did I know that once those two little people flew the nest after stomping on every heartstring attached to the deepest depths of my soul, they would take huge chunks of my heart right along with them. Those two little darlings that for the most part defined my highest calling and greatest purpose on this planet, stole a piece of my heart the minute they took their first breaths. And through all the strong willed tantrums, first time they refused to hold my hand while crossing the street or showing me that they didn’t really need my help while packing the car to head back to campus, they continued to step on my heartstrings and drive off with yet another chunk of my heart. You see a mom doesn’t stop being a mom once her kids graduate high school or college or move into their first apartment. A mom is a mom until she takes her last breath. And once those little birdies are fully independent and not returning home on the reg for school breaks, we realize that while they still need us, oh how they still need us—just look at your text conversations or try not answering a grown child’s phone call on the first attempt she dials your number—they are managing life on their own. Mostly. Well, actually even if we hate to admit it, pretty darn well without our help. And while they now actually do walk around out there amongst all the scary stuff that we once envisioned as they loosened the grip on our hand and carefully navigated for the first time crossing the road by themselves, they actually held onto all those pieces and chunks of our heart. Which might also explain that why on dark, silent nights when a pandemic continues to roar amongst our cities and towns, this momma really, really misses the chaos of those earlier days that would eventually melt into the silence of the nights when both my children were upstairs quietly asleep. Yes, mamas, the days are long. But not long enough.