Captain Reverend Mother

God was showing off Sunday night. At Spreckels Park, the evening had that perfect temperature where you forget you have skin, and the sky was doing that thing it does in August when it cannot decide between blue and lavender with a tease of orange. An 80s cover band mashed up Rick Astley, Pat Benatar, Guns N’ Roses, Michael Jackson, and a handful of glorious one-hit wonders. Blankets and strollers dotted the grass, along with charcuterie boards that cost more than my first car. Toddlers bounced in bare feet, teenagers swayed just enough to keep rhythm and looking cool, and silver-haired couples moved with the easy grace of two people who know each other’s steps on and off the dance floor.

My dog came with me. She is lovely, though useless as a dance partner, and spent the evening collecting admirers. I danced anyway, remembering summers when my boys were small enough to ride on my hip and happy to sing and sway with abandon. Those were the days when I could scoop them up, spin them under the stars, and hear their laughter rise above whatever music was playing.

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Monday morning, I registered my older son for high school. Two card tables. Three cheerful volunteers. Done in four minutes. He was not there, still sleeping as teenagers do in August. So I walked in alone, signed the papers alone, stepped back into the morning light alone. The whole thing felt like paying the electric bill. An ordinary errand, quiet page-turning on what reveals itself to be a whole new chapter.

On the ferry to work, I called my friend who is a spiritual grounding wire. She is the kind of person who answers the phone mid-laundry and somehow manages to untangle the knot in your chest with three sentences and a laugh. She listened while I spilled out the small heartbreak of it all, then then handed me words that became the scaffolding for what you are reading now. (Thank you, God, for such friends.)

People try to warn us about this stuff. They lower their voices in grocery store checkout lines, saying it all goes faster than you think. We nod like we get it. Really, though, the truth does not hit until it shows up somewhere in our chest, this quiet awareness that the center of their life has started moving outward.

My education in this began when he was maybe two days old. There was this soft cotton onesie with tiny fish swimming across it, prophetic for a boy who would grow up to love fishing. It fit him perfectly when we brought him home from the hospital. By week’s end it was too tight. There I was, standing in a fog of new-parent exhaustion, holding something he had outgrown. I cried under the illusion that the moment itself could be preserved. My spouse, steadier than I am, said, “Parenting is an ongoing series of letting it go.” I heard the words, but I could not yet live them.

I have since lived that truth many a time, many a season. In ministry, it rises each time I bless someone stepping into a new chapter, aware my part was to help them reach it and then stand back. Military life teaches the same lesson. Every time someone transfers, or change of command, or PCS (permanent change of station) when we say goodbye to a community we built from scratch.

With children, though, it is different. The letting go is slower, more relentless, a tide that reshapes the shoreline. My arms still remember when my boys fit entirely against my chest. My ears still hear the unformed voice that once said “a doh doh” for “I love you.” These memories stay sharp while the present keeps moving forward.

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Now it is Tuesday, and I am in an OR waiting room while my soon-to-be freshman is under anesthesia for knee surgery. This quiet has a different weight. Sunday’s was wistful, softened by music and the smell of grass. Monday’s was efficient, almost businesslike, papers shuffling and pens clicking while futures got filed away. Today’s is steady and attentive, the kind that comes when they are out of your sight and in someone else’s care.

Threshold moments rarely announce themselves with any sort of fanfare. Concerts without a dance partner, high school registration, an OR vigil while our loved one rests under the watch of others. Each is a quiet holiness. The same sacred ordinariness in a shared meal at the parish hall, a prayer spoken softly enough for only one other person to hear, a candle’s flame holding steady in the dark.

Sometimes I think of that fish onesie, how I kept it for weeks draped over my grandmother’s rocking chair, as if seeing it every day might somehow slow the clock. Eventually, I donated it, folded into a bag bound for another baby I would never meet. Some things stay with us. Others we release, trusting they will have a life beyond our hands.

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Sunday brought music under the stars. Monday, a clipboard and two card tables. Tuesday, a waiting room during a surgery. All part of fifteen years of becoming who he is. Love remains the steady thread, close enough to hold while giving him the space to walk forward…even if, for now, it will be on crutches.

That may be the whole work of raising a child, to keep blessing the space between you as it grows. Then again, that just may be the way of everything.