A stage of life

I am at the stage of life when something predictable happens when I meet friends I haven't seen for some time.....the conversation zooms in to our children. The usual conversation goes like this "So what are your children doing now?" And each person relates the wheres and hows of the children....how some are still pursuing tertiary education, some may have finished and are working.....and maybe a few are about to get married. (Yes, I am at the age where not many friends have married children and have become grandparents...) Less often do people really talk about themselves....what they are doing now that the children are grown, how they are spending their time.......as if our lives continually revolve around the life cycle of our children, as we did in the early years. I sometimes find it hard to answer questions about my children because I find they are changing all the time and it gets harder and harder to define them as this or that and my main concern at this stage is to 'let them go'. Easy to do when they seem to choose the path in life that I want them to choose but not so easy when they listen to the beat of a different drum.

Maybe I am unconventional in this, and maybe this is a more Western thing - but in letting them go, my desire would be to speak with others who are doing likewise. Maybe it would be helpful to share our motherly struggles with letting them go, and entrusting them to God. This is still a great struggle for me. i remember almost three years ago at a retreat the retreat director told me that I need to let my children go. Now, it is three years on.......and I am still allowing the Lord to form me in this.

So perhaps this is the very place where I am invited to encounter God....in the (graced) letting go.....of different aspects of life.