I Only Blinked...

I had this dream that my children were growing up.  One was a senior, one was a sophomore and one was a fifth grader and I was just getting old.  I looked at them and I saw them as a seven year old, a five year old, and a baby but then I blinked and they were seventeen, fifteen, and ten.  It was the oddest experience.  The only problem is that it wasn't a dream.  It is reality.

These children are growing up and I am having a hard time reconciling myself to that fact.  These teenagers of mine drive me crazy.  I'm going to keep it real here for a moment.  You will never hear me say that my children are perfect or that they have no area that needs work.  They are teenagers and I have to tell you that when I was a teenager I didn't like teenagers.  My opinion hasn't changed much.  I love these girls more than life itself and I would given them my life if they needed an organ to survive, but they make me crazy.  There are days when the drama is so intense with them that I have to excuse myself and just leave.  I can't say anything right, I can't look at them right, I can't exist properly around them because whatever I do is wrong.  So I leave and take a break for a bit to get a coffee drink that tastes nothing like coffee and come back. 

It occurs to me now that I think about it, that my mother did the same thing.  We fought all the time.  She would leave and go to the Legion to sign the book.  I still have no idea what that means but I think it was a pool of some sort to win money.  I think she was trying to win enough that either she could take a long vacation from me or send me away to boarding school.  I have thoughts of just leaving the girls the house and taking the men of the family and moving away.  It sounds like a good plan when in the midst of the drama and they are either yelling at each other over the bathroom sink (which is only amusing because there are three bathroom sinks in this house but they have to fight over the one) or yelling at me because I "bully" them into studying for finals or because I looked at them wrong.  Was I this bad?  I was a good kid in my memory and it really isn't that they are bad.  They are good kids they just may have to become lawyers because they love arguing. 

To clarify I would never leave them.  Part of my issue is that I am terrified of them leaving me.  How dare they grow up and leave me!  I blinked, I swear it was only a blink and now I have a senior?  I was just taking her to Sears to get her two year old pictures taken and now she is a senior?  Now I  have to get senior pictures taken.  I'm guessing that since our Sears went out of business I'm going to have to find someone else to take her pictures. 

When I look up from my desk I see the plaster  hand print she made in preschool hanging on the wall.  A token from days gone by.  Then I look farther into the next room and see the wall hanging that has Jeremiah 29: 11 "I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."  One of my favorite bible verses.  I have looked to that verse as it applies to my own life time and again.  I may not know God's plan for me all the time but I have to trust that His plan is best.  Now I sit here and contemplate what that means for my daughter who has one year left of high school.  I know I am scared of her leaving and I know she is scared to leave too.  We don't know the entire plan here.  She has ideas of what she wants, I have ideas of what I want for her but God is the only one who knows what He wants for her and what His plan is for her.  He knows the plans He has for her.  His plan is to prosper her and give her hope and a future.  In that I take my refuge, in that I place my hope and my faith and I know she will be o.k. and maybe, just maybe I will be o.k. too.