There’s a crib under my bed.  A small wooden nest that cradled my babies for nearly a decade has found its final resting place where I lay my head each night.  Adorned with teeth marks of four little people, I refuse to let Matt donate this white badge of honor. “It’s no longer taking up space in the garage,” cracked the father to my Blondies.  Then it’s going under our bed.

   Frugal me says it’s in a holding pattern; a sacred structure awaiting future grandchildren.  But that’s not it at all.  

   Those strangers in restaurants were right.  They do grow up fast and the teenage years are not for the faint-of-heart.  Yet here I am, on the eve of my twenty-second Mothers’ Day, lamenting the words of Keith Urban: Life is a balance of holding on and letting go.  What those unknown, veteran parents concealed was the heartache I would feel in the middle of the night, the tears I would see in my children’s father’s eyes, and the prayers I would worry never made it up to heaven.  They left out the part about anguish, grief, emptying and surrender.  They didn’t tell me I would be brought to my knees, with an extra large dose of humility, right back to my young adult years with my own mother.  

   And so here I lie, my dismantled timber relic safely tucked away; surrendering, entrusting, praying for balance.