The Slow Way: How The Old Thing Lets Go
All things are being made new, but first the old things are letting go. Wisdom lies in the truth of both.
Place is how I measure time in my memories of the earliest years, when Chris and I moved homes seven times those first ten years of marriage. And this particular memory happened in our apartment on 11th Ave, a flat above the artist couple who chastised me for our kids’ 6 am wake up sounds (they preferred to sleep till 8:30), and whose marijuana smoke floated through the chimney into our living room, its distinct scent sticking to my memories of the evenings after the boys had gone to sleep.
Chris had been putting them to bed and I had been waiting for him on the couch, dishes done, tea in my hand, like I sometimes did in those days. Scratch that. Probably I was writing, my laptop open on my legs, tea made but somewhere to the side, balancing precariously on the flat armrest of the couch, or on the desk that stood behind it, dividing one section of the space from living room to office. I remember looking up as he made his way down the long skinny hall of our typical San Francisco style flat, his feet padding the rug we had specially made to capture the sound of our boys’ tiny feet, prone to running, no matter how much we promised the artists below we would fix the “noise issue.”
Chris was wiping his eye with a thumb as he walked, his shoulders stooped by weighted clarity. I must have moved the laptop, or sat the tea down, adjusted my legs so that my knees turned toward his moving body. Because he sat beside me gently and I gathered him up, the way my few years of motherhood had taught me to gather shoulders, to wrap myself around a body, even if this one was no toddler—the man I had married nine years before, his 6’4” frame, his broad shoulders.
What did he say? It was something like how, as he was singing to August, that boy’s kindergarten-sized body in the top bunk, five years of the same minor key lullaby, it had occurred to him that there would be a last time. All these nights, one after another dragging on and on, feet pounding the long hallway, our sharp hisses to quiet it down, the neighbors’ bangs on the floor beneath our feet. And their clean and lotioned pajama’d bodies under sheets and full of words—their joy, or anger, or fear for whatever the night held. All the long evenings and every meal we made again and again and the clean up and tantrums and the tooth brushing. And Chris singing that same song standing beside the ladder of the bunk bed. He realized there would be a last time he sang that song. One day it would end.
And he cried. So I cried too. Was it even nighttime? Maybe it was morning? Maybe we were drinking coffee and he remembered the feeling. Maybe I wiped his tear. There on 11th Ave in the Inner Richmond.
This week they came home from the places they’ve been this past summer. I asked as many questions as they would answer, their answers darting from story to joke to photo—doing my best to remember the names they shared, the bits of moments their stories might drop toward me, trinkets of the men they’re becoming. This, I’ve decided, is not as much about parenting as about growing older, about the ways all of the world catches and releases us, bits at a time, rarely all at once. So slowly sometimes that we don’t notice. How many times did we sing our boys to sleep? Hundreds. And how many times did we cry that it would one day end? One.
“Inasmuch as we are dying,” Shannon K. Evans writes in her book Rewilding Motherhood, “we are also creating. Inasmuch as old things are passing away, we are also being made new. We are less of who we were and so much more of who we will be. . . God is all in all.”
I lay down in my bed Friday afternoon, twelve hours after driving late at night to pick August up from camp, a task my body just can’t seem to handle anymore. I want to fight against the rage that flares in my brain when I mistreat my body for the good of my kid. It’s not supposed to work this way. I’m supposed to push myself to love him, and that is supposed to be enough.
But there’s always a last time for bodies. Our young bodies age eventually. We either begin listening to them or learn our hard lessons again and again. The big boys joined me on the bed, showing me pictures for as long as the flames behind my eyes could still look at their screens. And then they left.
Chris took Ace to the neighborhood pool while I rested in the dark room, frozen peas over my eyes. When he returned I asked how the time at the pool was. “So good,” he said: “I know the end of summer makes you sad, but I love it. The long shadows and the cooler nights.”
It does. The end of summer does make me sad. Longer shadows and cooler nights remind me that this is ending. We will pack up the pools just like the kids come home from camp, and the harvest will arrive and the butterflies will migrate, and everyday we will shuttle off to school and there will be homework and forms to fill out. I will still be here in this same house where the smell of blossoms once met me every summer morning. But soon the the wind will blow in cool, flicking leaves everywhere, covering the porch furniture until Chris and I give up on our morning coffee time outside and move the cushions to the basement again.
I have always wanted summer forever. And not just summer—July. I want July forever. Some part of me wanted babies running down that hall in 11th Ave just to torture me, and the endless dishes in the sink, and my still-young husband making his way toward me, his thumb padding the tear from his face.
“We are already in the autumn of our lives,” Chris said recently. And he wasn’t even crying. Dying every day and still creating. Old things passing, and still this wisdom growing. Becoming who I will be while the ones I love become who they will be.
For something to become new, the old thing must let go—a shadow lengthening, a leaf releasing from the branch, the earth tilting ever so slightly away from the source of light.
A Slow Practice
This week we’re going for a late summer walk. Remember those nature walks you used to take as a kid? Bring some kind of small bag with you and as you walk pay close attention for *treasures* to collect, bits of the natural world that only exist at this moment of the year.
In just a couple of months, the leaves will be turning and letting go, the flowers that are blooming will be gone. The creatures (you can take pictures of them, btw, you don’t need to collect these!) may be off somewhere new or undertaking new tasks. The world around you will be new, and this world you’re currently in, will be old.
How can you savor the feel of this one right now?
What do you feel on your skin?
Where is God in this moment?
What around you is particular to now? What around you is a reminder that God is making all things new?
What do you want to say to God about the things you’ve collected, about the natural world around you as you’ve experienced it?
What is one thing, feeling, or memory you want to take away from this time?
When you’re ready, close with this prayer:
Lord of Late Summer, let me hold tightly to the hope in the end of things, so I can cling to the gift of all that is being made new. Amen.
This made me cry. It is so true, and now I’m going through the progression of aging realizing I won’t just leave sons and their wives, but granddaughters that have taken much of the residence of my heart left by my wife’s death. I still miss her sometimes so much it aches. I still love my family so much it sometimes ache. I think we must simultaneously hold the spiritual, mental, and emotional tension to be our healthiest. Thanks for sharing, Micah! You are an immense drop of grace in my life.
You’ve so beautifully captured the ebb and flow of parenting older teens and young adults, all the while journeying to listen to the body with real limits through which you pour out your love in ways large and small. The goodness and the ache - that’s exactly right.