Children Leaving the Nest
Leonie

"That special power of loving that belongs to a woman is seen most clearly when she becomes a mother. Motherhood is the gift of God to women. How grateful we must be to God for this wonderful gift that brings such joy to the whole world, women and men alike!"
Mother Teresa of Calcutta

As our children grow, so do our challenges. Our role as a mother changes, as our children change and become young adults. Just as we learned to be a mother to a baby, a toddler, perhaps to a multi age family, so we now learn to be a mother of a young adult. And often these young adults live away from us, because of work and study and vocations.

Now is the time that we reap the fruits of our labours. We can see how our years together in homeschooling and in the family have shaped our children and ourselves. We can rejoice in the choices of our young adults and we can learn to let go and trust how God and His Graces and the Sacraments will work in the lives of our adult children...We can trust God, even if our children's choices are not always what we would wish...The relationships formed in our real learning lifestyles can be invisible bonds over time.

As always, we can turn to literature to help us deal with the natural sadness experienced by separation. In the book "Because of Winn Dixie", Gloria reminds us that "We cannot hold onto those we love. We can only love them while we have them."

We love them while we have them. We love our children always and still we let them go. We cry over separation, and our tears are tears of love.

We love and we give without counting the cost - sadness sometimes comes with the giving of mothering.

We give without counting the cost. We give ourselves in our mothering, we get a lot back but there is a cost - and who would count it?

"To love at all is to be vulnerable."
C.S. Lewis

"It is love alone that gives worth to all things."
Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus