Permeability

To mothers of seniors, in April.

April is a time of visit days.

The campus fills with accepted students and their families, walking paths they have never walked before, trying to imagine a life that has not yet begun. Above them, light moves through the leaves, flickering and shifting.

There is a particular kind of energy to it, hopeful, uncertain, a little frayed at the edges.

And then there are the mothers.

Especially the ones for whom this is the first child, or the only one, about to leave.

They are trying so hard to hold everything together.

They are feeling joy and pride and frustration at the way their children are still behaving like children, and something like awe at the ways they are already becoming adults. They are aware, viscerally aware, that a vast separation is at hand.

And I can see them, sometimes, building something like a wall around themselves. Not out of coldness, but out of love. Out of the need to keep it together for their children, for their families, for the moment.

Sister, I see you.

I see the way you bite your lip. I see the way you hold the smile. I see the flicker of doubt that crosses your face, and the pride that seems to rise from every corner of your being despite it. I see your awareness that this most fundamental relationship, the one that changed you from yourself into a mother, is shifting beneath your feet.

And I want to say to you, I know you.

I know you, because I was you.

I remember feeling that my heart, my skin, my very body could not possibly contain all that I was feeling. The excitement and the dread and the worry and the pride, all of it co-mingling, indistinguishable from one another.

I remember wanting, somehow, to hold it still. To keep it from spilling over.

What I did not know then, but know now, is that nothing was being lost.

That even when things felt uncertain, even when the landing was not perfectly smooth, what mattered most was not control, but care. That if my child landed in a place where they were seen as a person, where they were held, challenged, known, there would be space enough for them to grow.

What I know now is that the only way through that season was not to contain it, but to allow it.

To let the love and the fear and the pride and the grief move through me, rather than trying to seal myself against them.

To be, in a way that felt terrifying at the time, permeable.

Because it is only in that permeability of heart and soul that the fullness of the experience can be felt, not just the ache of it, but the joy.

And perhaps this is not only for them.

Perhaps the message I find myself offering, quietly and inwardly, to these mothers each day is also the one I am still learning to receive.

Because I, too, am standing in a season of change.

Not one that can be neatly named or marked on a calendar, but one I can feel nonetheless, subtle and insistent, reshaping the contours of my days, asking something new of me.

And again, the instinct is to brace. To hold. To gather everything in and keep it from spilling over.

But what I know now, what I am always learning anew, is that the life I most want is not one I can hold tightly.

It is one I must remain open to.

It is only by that same permeability of heart and soul that I can meet what is coming, not just with endurance, but with joy.