The Caterpillar and The Butterfly

This post has been low temp slow cooking for a while.  It's being borne out of and by the inherent sorrow that belongs exclusively to parenthood.  It's a peculiar brand as it inextricably entangled with joy and gratitude. 

It's the changing of the caterpillar into a butterfly.  Over and over and over and over and over (ad infinitum (we hope)) again. 

It's watching your baby grow older.  Rather, watching your baby continually being replaced by newer, older, bigger, differenter versions of herself.  Of himself.

Last night, as I tucked my 10 year old boy in for the last time, we talked a little about how in the morning, he'd have been replaced by an 11 year old.  At the grave risk of being even more melodramatic - a mini-death is what we'd called it.  We smiled together about it.  It was copacetic.  

Which brings me back to the metaphor that seems to be held as the fertile ground of hope (proof?) that things don't really end, they just change.  The caterpillar becoming the butterfly.  It would be easy to think the caterpillar has died. Especially as we see him ensconced in his cocoon.  But if we wait long enough.  If we are still and patient, we will be rewarded. A new and beautiful creature will emerge to greet us.  But what of the caterpillar? He can't be recognized in the butterfly!  Yet, we know.  We know the caterpillar is in there.  Somewhere.  Everywhere.



Who could have known (except all the mothers and fathers before, with, and after me) that special sorrow? That heartcrack, the edges of which are coated with joy. Hands fly to face, to heart, to reach, to hold, to grasp the flash of time. The impossibly subtle shifts that suddenly become glaring and terrifyingly beautiful bounds of growth, of new person.

I beg you to forgive me for the clumsiness of this language.  I am in rather a clumsy state as a whirl and turn, bewildered at having arrived here almost without knowing how.

In the short space of 4 days I've celebrated my firstborn becoming a teenager and my second born firmly establishing his foothold in the double digits and stepping into the realm of the tween.

It seems so odd and silly, doesn't it?  It seems contrary that I should feel this way.  This little (I lied.  This rather embarrassingly large) heartbreak.  This fishing line (trawler's net?) of sorrow plumbing the depths of my love, joy and general state of awe at being the mother of these two completely other people.  One would imagine only happiness that they are growing and healthy and happy and thriving.  Pride at the achievements and the people they are being and becoming. Wonder all the things that are uniquely their own.  All the good feelings.

And yes.  Yes to all those things and more.  (Pictured here are a pair of animé eyes with those oversized pupils and reflection spots, all wide-eyed shining with awe.)

One might be confounded at the very notion of sadness coming to roost in the midst of these wonderful things.  What's there to be sad about?

But it is.  It is sad.   All the farewells.  All the goodbyes.  All the ends of all the stages (remember when...?).   The disappearances of the hand-held baby, the busy toddler, the curious little kid, the rapidly developing bigger kid.  These are hinged on, are flip sides of, the joyful appearances of all the same versions. 

Here I stand greeting two new people. 
A teenager has arrived.  My little girl has gone.
A tween has arrived. My little boy is going.

It's pure, radiant joy.  It's deep, beautiful sorrow.

I suspect that this may be the sweetest sorrow there is.