Growing pains

Many mothers my age are beginning to feel it. It is no longer someone else's experience - still very distant from us - when we come to this stage. I bumped into a friend the other day. She has children about the same age as mine. We caught up a bit about our children - the usual talk about what colleges are good etc. She said that when the children are young we often want to them to grow up fast - yet when they get to that grown up age, we feel differently. How true! And yet, this is something we usually learn from hindsight. But thank God that most of us have 'enjoyed' our children when they were young enough to want to be around us most of the time.

The 'letting go' we do at this stage is very different from the time when they walked away from us for the first time into the classroom. This time, we sense that the world out there is much more risky, filled as it is with many temptations and pitfalls. Just hear the stories from youth workers and it is enough to cause many hours of worry! At the same time, I am trying to look at this period as a crucial time, fraught with danger yet also filled with unseen graces for my children. How do I live the tension between genuine concern and over protectiveness? I have no answers since this is a 'first'. As I pray for them each day, I ask the Lord to "make me the kind of mother they need" rather than ask that they be "the kind of children I want". In this day and age, there is no better way to live authentically holding to faith, hope and love.