Letting Go

In my imagination, I will die an old woman with beloved children and grandchildren gathered around me, and I will be ready.

But right now, in this moment, I don't want to think about dying. I prefer thinking about the new baby and about our daughter, happy with her size, doing what she calls an 'egg dance' around her house. She says she looks like an egg.

I sometimes, too, don't want to think about the fact that all three of our children are grown or close to it, and this is an era of letting go of what for so long just was--and making way for something else.

It started when our same 'egg dancer' went to second grade. Before then I had home schooled her--taught her how to tell the difference between a moth and a butterfly by looking at the fuzzy antennas the moth wore. They're different than a butterfly's. I wrote somewhere in some journal about those days. I don't know where the journal is or as parents always say--where the time went.

I do know that when I look into the future now, I don't see our girl in her blue coat, zipped tight around her neck, looking slightly frightened in my mind, heading off to school and all the beginning and letting go that meant for me and for her.

Instead I anticipate a time when we will welcome this soon-to-be grandson, and more and more--we will see our children making choices without any approval or advice from me or my husband.

In all this, there is a surrender I must, I am required to acknowledge, as certainly as our pregnant daughter will relinquish the 'egg dance' for another, not yet known dance with a son she will never own.