Tail Lights

This Sunday story is, “From holding inner lights, to watching tail lights … “

Have you watched someone drive away, someone you love?

Did you hold them in your womb, or your arms?

Were you checking the time swiftly passing along the way?

Were you measuring their height in notches on the stairway?

Do you remember planting smooches in the roundness of their baby cheeks?

Were you there to see their first steps, or not long after, and did you smile when they ran to you?

I know you probably forgot to stop sometimes and take it all in along the way.?

You’re okay though. You really are. They know ?you. They love you, and they watched what it means to go for something, to not sit idle. They learned to do things on their own too.?

I understand that we carry our children. I understand the great responsibility and joy of that journey. But, we also carry our dreams too. They need to see us dreaming.?

Mothers, fathers, and caregivers, we’re doers, and workers. We adapt to survive. We figure it out. We fix, we haul, we keep the calendars, we organize, we cook, we clean, we collapse, and we get up again. For them, we get up over, and over, and over again. ?

We hold babies, and laptops, and bills. We breathe, we cry, we power through the headaches, we try, we fail, we give up hope and then we find hope again.?

We listen and sometimes we don’t.?

Because, we’re tired.?

But even when we’re tired, we are tangled up in that invisible, but oh so real cord, between us and them.?

Our belly sometimes aches for them to be back inside us, stretching our tummies out so far that we cannot even slide behind the wheel of our automobiles anymore.?

Then, before we know it, they are sliding into a pickup truck.?

We’re at the door, a little older now, with life lights in our hair. We’re watching tail lights go somewhere, else.?

We miss the lights we once held inside us, the lights in their eyes, the energy coursing through their veins, the feeling of all that potential. Their hearts beating next to ours.?

But, from the very start, children are always moving away from us.?

They take root inside our fertile wombs. Yet they are always moving to that next place that will nourish them body, intellect, love, and soul.?

That next space that is a distance between us, yes. But it’s really an extension of us, wherever they go, people may catch glimpses of us, in the way they talk, laugh, or move.?

But really we want them to see themselves fully, to love themselves, to be free to stretch out into the vastness of who they are, to reach their limits and a step after that.?

From holding our inner lights as seeds deep within us, to watching their tail lights driving away, we gasp at the speed of time. Tail lights take our breath away.?

Time drives them forward, away, and back to us. As one of the lines of Luke’s song lyrics say, “I am tethered to this county.”

I am tethered to you too Luke, to that precious inner light you started as in my womb. ??

It must have been destiny Luke, that your name means “light-giving.” And as much as those tail lights make me sigh, I know you will come back again too. I pray you do. I hope you do.?

I want to hear about it all. I really do.?

So go chase that light in you. Chase it all the way to the stars and back and home sometimes too.

The only son, with a one and only sister, both of them, the lights of my life.?

Yes, from inner lights, to tail lights, I love you both forever and around the bend after that.