Time Passages

It seems like everybody I know on Facebook that has kids is commenting on how fast time has flown and how quickly their children are growing up.  So I'm kind of caught up in that thought pattern.

I've just sent my fourth of five children off to college.  Sure it has been hard with all of them for different reasons.  The first one is SO hard because you've never done it before.  But each kid is tied to your heart in different ways so you miss them all but worry and pray for each of them differently.

This year I sent off my first daughter.  It is OH so different.  I don't think she will ever know the depth of my yearning for her to be the woman I pray for her to be.  And simultaneously, how much I pray that God will fill in the gaps of all the things I failed to model for her rightly.

Some friends and I have discussed recently how when we were freshmen in high school we were terrified of  the seniors and thought they were so old and mature.  Then, when the day came for us to be seniors we wondered why we didn't feel old OR mature.

I think that is something that never changes.  For me anyway.

This afternoon I had to make a phone call about helping with a funeral at church.  It sent me back in time to when I was a child and listened throughout the day to my mom making phone calls for things like that.  For her it was her only means of communication.  She didn't have email, facebook or cell phones to "discuss" things with her friends or shop online, etc. But I thought she was the epitome of womanly maturity.

But maybe, just maybe, she felt like I do.

In many instances in life I go through the motions of maturity while all the time deep inside I  feel so insecure and inexperienced.  I remember once dragging my four older kids with me to pick up my husband at the airport.  Before I left it flashed into my mind "you're too young to be running around the city with four little kids".  And yet I was the MOM of those four little kids.  Good thing they didn't know how insecure and unprepared I was for so much of what I did while raising them.

There is a seventh grader left at home with me.  She has come so far in the past ten years.  Sometimes I can't believe she is the same child we brought all the way across the world and to whom we taught the English language at age 3.  At the same time I feel very unprepared and ill equipped to train her and help her through the next 6 school years of her life.

Wasn't I JUST in seventh grade myself?????