Life dances its days before us, each day emerging, combusting, and evaporating into the next.  PB&Js, sliced red peppers, zipped backpacks, seat belt “clicks,” “goodbye”s, “how was your day?”s, and “I love you, see you in the morning”s.  Then, as if suddenly, it has been seven years.

How much have you taught me?  How much more will you expand my rib cage to hold this heart?  It is almost too much to fathom.

I am not ready for all the celebrations.  I am not yet prepared to wholeheartedly walk through the threshold.  But I love you.  And that love is the ultimate end of these days.  So I will dive into the favor-bag-creating, soup-making, gift-wrapping, and list-making.  And I will begin to let my mind pause and let stillness settle so that my everyday heart might melt enough to see you in all your glory and be undone by what it does to me.

All love, when seen unfiltered and received in full, holds power to expand us up to the boundaries of our human flesh and bone and sinew and heart.  Without an idea of the God who created us and holds us together, I cannot imagine bearing the weight of this love alone.

Gratitude swells.  Awe multiplies.  Humility grows.

Here I stand, a mother – the one with the beating, exposed heart, just as dangerously-tender and boldly-alive as the day that they set you in my arms for the first time.