It is Advent. I ask my teenage sons to get the boxes full of Christmas decorations from the garage. I know what I’ll find inside: remnants of the past. Chubby-cheeked photos and little handprints on ornaments. Mid-elementary photos, strung together with curly ribbon, where teeth look so big in little mouths—so different from the chiseled jaw of my eldest, the one who made me a mother 18 years ago. Offhandedly I talk about his “last Christmas,” though next year, God willing, he’ll come home from college for the holiday. He won’t be gone.
But still, the season will be different than it has been these past 18 years. This December, I wake him each day and toast him a bagel before he drives to school. Not next year. The air in our home will have shifted. I’m not sure what to do about what’s coming. How do I mark a “last” with both joy for his future and sadness that the past is gone?
There’s this trend going around the internet in which a parent scoops up and holds an unwieldy teenager, an intentional “last time I picked you up.” The videos sound cheesy but can be surprisingly moving. We need rites of passage to mark not just the firsts but the lasts.
When my son turned 18 a few months ago, my husband said a blessing over him in front of extended family, marking the shift from boy to man. It was appropriate and beautiful. But now, as I open boxes and put up decorations, I’m not sure what this middle space between the milestones should look like. Graduation is coming, but it isn’t here yet.
I’m deeply conscious of a sort of dance mothers must do with sons—remaining a soft place to land but acknowledging that, as they grow, they are more completely entering the company of men. They need to prove themselves away from the home, putting the integrity and resilience we’ve hopefully instilled in them into practice.
But I already miss him. I miss the dress-ups and read-alouds. I miss gathering leaves on nature walks, eating snacks on blankets in the living room, and reading his illustrated Star Wars stories in first grade. I miss always being the one to hold and soothe.
My voice catches with self-restraint on the mornings where he heads out without much of a look back, grabbing his bagel. I say casually, “Hey, son. I love you. I’m proud of you.” These are sending words—a sort of benediction from childhood to adulthood. They seem the only appropriate ones, resonant with both sadness and joy. Words like these give a child a story to belong to, a home to return to, and an encouragement to explore, but they are tinged around the edges with longing for what was.
As I sit in my quiet house, looking out my kitchen windows, I wonder: What did God’s missing feel like as he called, “Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9) to his wayward children in the Garden of Eden? Surely longing propelled his love. But his rescue—though it went to great lengths—was often subdued, restrained. His people were in Egypt for 400 years, after all. And I meditate on his love for his Son. At Jesus’ baptism, when we hear the words of God the Father, he’s saying a version of the words I give my child. This is my beloved kid! Listen to him. I’m so proud of my boy (Matt. 3:17).
Friends ask me how I’m doing in this year of lasts. It’s not just my eldest. When spring comes, my other three children will be graduating from elementary school, graduating from middle school, and heading into senior year, respectively. In six years, our nest will be empty.
My children’s early years were full of great intention: going on library visits and to music class, reading The Jesus Storybook Bible daily, practicing hospitality with neighbors and churchgoers who would come for lunch most Sundays. We established rhythms of worship, play, and care.
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As we begin this launching season, intentionality looks different. It is more understated guiding, more availability. It is less directive. They do the choosing and doing: selecting friends, doing homework, participating in activities of their own choosing. It is acknowledging what we always knew to be true in the lives of our children: God directs and holds. We are not in control. We’re witnesses to God’s work and simply along for the ride. Yet being along for the ride feels particularly vulnerable now, as if we’re turning a page into a new chapter we won’t have the privilege of writing.
To be vulnerable means to be fragile and finite and open to attack. As CT’s editor at large Russell Moore recently wrote, “Flesh and blood in Scripture is depicted as the ability to die, to be killed, to be vulnerable.” Our manger scenes seem tame to the reality of that first Christmas, Moore writes—Christ come to take on our flesh as a dependent infant who would one day die for the sins of the world. Christ is no stranger to being wounded for love’s sake.
When we love as Jesus did, we must always invite the possibility of being wounded. Love means opening ourselves to small hurts and major rejections, to pain, and eventually to loss.
For me as a mother, the loss of this family as we’ve known it for the last 18 years is its own sort of wound. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m also gleefully anticipating time with just my husband in a handful of years, and I’m excited to see how the next chapter will likely add new family members to love and enfold.) Things are changing. Whereas the chaos of early motherhood was its own transition, this calm of the sending years is new in its own way. The bookends of parenting put my finitude in stark relief.
This awareness of my own fragility is a gift. It reminds me that I am human and dependent on a good God. It reminds me that it is God, not I, who writes my children’s stories.
This December, we laugh as we take out the childish creations and place them on the tree: the quirky smiles, the painted handprints, the wording on T-shirts in photos that got cropped when they were made into ornaments. Behind my laughter is, of course, a wince—a loss that tries to transform itself into gratitude by slowing down time, sealing this moment into memory. Time still slips through my fingers.
My son places the star on top of the tree. I catch his eye. “Son, I love you. I’m so proud of you.”
Ashley Hales is editorial director for features at Christianity Today.
