Summer Teal

Twelve years of school are winding to a close, college acceptance has been achieved, and vacation plans are now pen marked on the summer calendar.  Relatives will be arriving this week for graduation celebrations and laughter will replace the hectic hurry of the school year.  The squalor in the parlor has been neatly tidied and I am left to contemplate the simple joys in front of me.

Teal has always been my serenity color.  It calms me.  Soothing as the sea and crisp as line-dried linen, I could swim in this color forever.  It is the siren shade of fresh starts and reminds me that I have two months before Baby Girl leaves home and starts her new life three hundred miles west in San Antonio.  I think of all the blessings that have paved her path and I am so thankful for the journey of motherhood. Teal was Baby Girl's nursery color eighteen years ago, so perhaps it's no coincidence I am craving this color palette today.

She is wood and crystal.  Stubborn, like her father, and beautiful (like her mother- snicker snicker snortle!)- she is a simple country girl with the complexity of prisms in sunlight. I don't worry about her going off to college because she is a traveler at heart- a student of the world and she is not one content to be confined.  I know letting her go is the beginning to her own spectacular journey.  So for the days and weeks ahead I will enjoy the simplicity, wander our vacation world, and enjoy every moment alongside the teal waters under the rotund Texas sun.

 

LOVE  &  LETTING GO

18 Years In The Blink Of An Eye

 Eighteen years ago a little baby was about to make its way into the world.  Expecting our first child, we had spent months picking out just the right name for a little boy.  Using my full nesting powers I hand stitched enough tiny fish to string a border around the entire nursery.  Though baby would come a week before the due date, Hubby and I were ready.  And as the final push passed, and  we waited for little Ethan's arrival announcement, we heard the doctor exclaim, "It's a healthy baby GIRL!" 

Though her birth is about the only time she has been early for anything ever- she hasn't stopped surprising us, amazing us, and making us laugh nearly every day of the last 18 years.  Looking back to my journal entry on the day she was born I wrote, "Part of me is sad because she has been all mine for the past 9 months, and now I have to share her with the world."

As fate would have it, she turned out to be our only child and in ways more than she will ever know, she taught me to relax, to play, to heal, and to walk with the most certainty against the strongest currents. I now understand why so many people tell new moms, "It goes by so very fast", because indeed time gathers its moments and slips forward in a hurry. 

 

In the next few months, she will graduate high school and go to college.  In the afternoon, when she is not at home, I listen to the silence.  I try to imagine what this house will sound like without the whirr of a hair dryer, Nikki Minaj wars with her Dad, and her voice as it sings above her guitar strumming.  I smile thinking of her in September, venturing 300 miles away to a new chapter in a big city chasing after her dreams.

 I find myself stealing time back to those selfish lines of the day she was born. I am so overwhelmed with happiness and pride, but yet I am sad.  I am not yet ready to share her with the world.

  LOVE  &  HAPPY BIRTHDAY!