Sending My Heart to Africa

My kitchen hums right now.  I'm home in the middle of the day, Windham Hill playing the Lucy and Linus theme song on the CD player.  The dryer is doing what it was created for.  It's my dream day, really.  I love days that are party sunny, or partly cloudy, and I don't much care which way you choose to see it.  To me, it's lovely. I'm doing the completely insignificant things in life that  bring life to me.  Folding laundry, doing dishes, putting things where things should be, creating order, creating "home".

Time was when I did it with six children swarming around me like so many bees.  Today I'm thinking about those bee children. Last year, at this very time, two of them set sail on making dreams come true out west.  They held me tight and told me goodbye and I lost it right there in their arms.  And yet I knew they had to go, should go. I set my girls' coffee cup on the window sill, the one she used when we shared our coffee together before she drove off, and told her it would stay there until she came home.

 Last night, my oldest boy, the one I practiced being a mama on for the first time, called me excited and nervous.  He's finally going back to Africa; a place he'd lived for a year and returned with it still beating in his chest.  "You'll go back," I told him then.  "Just watch.  Just wait.  You'll see."  He almost lost sight of that a few times, holding back tears of frustration and wanting to set down his flashlight and stop looking for the way.  But always, I'd tell him, I know it.....know it......in my heart.

So soon, he sets off.  God threw back the sash and pointed the way, just like that.  I listened to his voice in the phone and silently fist pumped.  My boy, wildly imperfect, unabashedly himself, Mr. Rogers creative; he'd rather make it himself with construction paper than buy it; the kid who planned his own birthday parties with a list attached to a clipboard......that boy is headed south.  In a big way.

Those mamas of you, in particular, reading this?  You can feel what I'm feeling right now.  You grab them hard and hug them close and cry proud and don't want to let go because it may be a long, long time before you see that face up close again?  But you push them away so they get a running start.

And watch them fly.

I love you, boy.  I love you.  I love you.  A thousand times.  And more.