Christianity Today: My Son’s Last Christmas at Home, by Ashley Hales:
[My eldest son] … 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? …
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. …
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). …
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. … 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.”
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