Looking across the table Chelsea and Sacha sat talking to Yann. I thought,
"They are grown up, they are adults, they are no longer children."
For the first time, I saw my children as adults. It was an odd observation.
Just like that, they no longer looked like nor felt like children. I have heard it said that children are children and that a mother's role/love never changes. Yet at that moment I felt my role as mother shifting, I am the mother of adults and it is different, a different role but the same love.
My children are adults. How did that happen?
I am pleased that they are independent, strong, responsible, caring…
A new chapter begins, has begun, I just didn't realize what page I was on.
Chelsea talks about her pregnancy, upcoming baby and her career, and what she hopes for and wants, and whether that can work.
Sacha talks about his goals for his career, his life in Seattle, and a certain someone in Italy.
Love, life, and work. Those conversations are the beginning of what will be their tomorrows.
I love their thought process, their reflections, their longings, their becoming…
Babies, toddlers, children, teens, young adults…
The sounds that become words,
words jumbled together eventually creating a sentence
some with meaning, some explaining, some just blowing in the wind,
Most ask, "Why? Then How? Then Why Not? Further down the line, How are you?"
The stories one by one too many to remember, forming a book without even knowing it,
Until chapters 50, 60, 70…
Oh, those stages of motherhood and mothering,
as my friend Cheryl (she is a mother of four), calls it:
"My life's work".
Even now, after the empty nest,
after the payments of their educations,
after their wings take them far away
even now this chapter has something to say about motherhood.
How do I know it is true? Because I am my mother's daughter, her oldest child, and I appreciate her mothering, even at sixty.
The Matriarch.
Last Christmas my mother who has celebrated Christmas with her family every year except for the time she was with us in France when Chelsea was born. Told my brothers and sisters-in-love that instead of Christmas at her home where she does the preparing, cooking, serving and entertaining, they were going to have a Progressive Christmas. They would start at one brother/sister-in-love's house for hors-d'oeuvres, then go to the next home for salad, and so on and so forth until they arrived at her home for dessert. My mom said that way everyone could see everyone's Christmas decorations, and the progressive dinner was to be simple, nothing complicated it was about being together not about working or stressing hard over how to do it.
Everyone enjoyed the Progressive Christmas. They are planning to do it for Easter.
Just like that my mother turned a page and started a new chapter, which I read as:
How to Have Christmas as a Family When I am No Longer able to Do it.
That is mothering, teaching us her children by example.
Loving us from infancy to adulthood and if we are lucky enough old age.
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