It's Not a Heart String.

As our children have gotten older, the physical distance between us has grown as they have grown and matured. Children start off in your arms, then they are on the floor at your feet, then across the room on shaky legs, then running across the yard, soon down the street on their bike, away for the weekend at a friend’s house, across the city on the train for a part-time job,  absent for some weeks in another state at camp or on mission, living away for a season at college…and then finally gone off on their own to live the lives we’ve helped them launch upon. This IS what we are working toward, after all, right?

I’ve always heard references to "a mother’s heartstrings" which supposedly tie our hearts to the hearts of our children.  (Which makes me think of apronstrings, but that's a different blogpost.)

The way I have begun to feel about this is perhaps less poetic. I don’t think it’s a heartstring, but rather a heartelastic. Yeah, not as pretty an image, but I didn't promise you pretty.

Imagine those really stiff elastics (or rubber bands, depending on where you are from) that don’t have much give and are really hard to stretch out.  We start off like that as new parents. That doubled piece of rubber can only stretch so far and it doesn’t have much give in it. It’s almost painful to stretch them then, isn’t it? And you're are always prepared for it to zing back and zap you in the head. We’re focused like that, on our babies, wanting them right up next to us. We have trouble not calling to check on them when we leave them the first time with grandma. It’s painful to leave them  for very long, and we always shoot right back to that close proximity because it feels right. I used to call my husband twice when I went out to do groceries at night when our eldest was a newborn. It just HURT to stretch those 5 miles!

As time passes, that elastic slowly stretches and allows a greater distance between us and our children…down the street, across town, away for a period of time. It keeps giving and giving…giving...allowing freedom and space and trust and finally that distance. We use cellphone, email, texting, all the time checking often. Our children are still attached, but the distance grows in how far from us they go and how long they are gone and how long between check-ins.--- 

And finally, the elastic seems to break…they are far removed…college perhaps-- but for us, Basic Combat Training and soon AIT. Really though, what’s happened is that the elastic is now a single strand rather than double…and it’s just longer.  It broke in one spot and is now twice the length. We can still hold one end and our children the other.--- There is a greater flexibility and give to the elastic then. We've given them what we said wanted to give them. Freedom, maturity, wings. In the end, the heartelastic doesn’t have to be stretched to reach from heart to heart, it's simply there providing a gentle tug of assurance that the other end is firmly attached.That's the part about unconditional love. Really, it's a heartelastic.