Launching Adults
I’ve held colicky babies, chased busy toddlers, instructed eager elementary kids, prayed with confused pre-teens, and steadied young men going through puberty. They’ve all called me mom. My sons are sixteen and eighteen. The oldest will be leaving for college in the fall (cue the Toy Story theme song and tears).
Now, I face the breaking off of the invisible umbilical cord of nurture and teaching that has fed my sons for eighteen years. My desire is to deliver them from dependence on mom to dependence on Christ. And this longing is a labor just as intense as the rhythmic pain which birthed their baby bodies into this world.
In Galatians 4, Paul writes to a church he fears has fallen for a false gospel, and he uses the image of a laboring woman to describe the pain and desire he has for these he loves: “My children, I am again suffering labor pains for you until Christ is formed in you” (Gal. 4:19). This is the tension of mothering through the breakup phase. It’s labor. It’s the tense stretching of a bow string to launch out an arrow of confidence in the power of the gospel.
There’s a scene in the Bible where Mary, Jesus’ mom, asks him to fix the missing wine situation at the wedding they’re attending.[1] Perhaps she’s just doing what mothers do, telling her son what to do. But this time, Jesus’ response isn’t, “Yes mom.” It’s a question that forces Mary to face the cords of parental authority breaking off from her invisible heart womb: “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come” (John 2:4).
Mary’s response makes me think about my own response to what Jesus is doing in my sons’ lives. Am I letting go? Am I pointing them to Jesus? Mary didn’t try to cling to her son, she let go and pointed others to Jesus. “Do whatever he tells you,” she told the servants (John 2:5).
My sons are not meant to always obey me. But they are meant to obey Jesus.
Letting go is hard. In this stage of life I’m facing my own fears and the idolatry of mothering I didn’t think was a problem. I’m afraid my sons won’t obey Jesus. And as ugly as it is, I see how my love for my sons could become, as C.S. Lewis put it in The Four Loves, gods and then demons that destroy the love and make it actually hatred.[2]
In this breakup phase of motherhood, I find myself vacillating between distancing myself from my sons and running to them to comfort my heartache. Neither is healthy. But I also find the Holy Spirit directing me to walk a road of faith that’s full of tension. I’m to take my sons by the hand—but I’m to take that hand and place it in God’s.
At the end of 1 Samuel, when the friendship of David and Jonathan is being broken up by the murderous mission of Saul, Jonathan goes to David, and the passage says Jonathan “strengthened [David’s] hand in God” (1 Sam. 23:16). Jonathan believed David would be king, he loved him, and he could have tried to cling to David, but he didn’t. He strengthened David’s hand in God.
And there lies the opposing pull of the Spirit, stretching me during this season of mothering. I still have sons at home. They aren’t established adults yet. The world is scary. So much works against the hope I have that they will love Jesus and follow him. I’m tempted to harden my heart, let go, and walk away in self-protection. But Christ in me won’t let it happen. There’s a labor happening at this phase of mothering. It stretches me to take my almost-adult sons by the hand and not cling to them, but place their hands in God’s.
What does that look like? For me it looks like asking my sons to look at their calendars and schedule time with me and an open Bible. It’s asking them what they're struggling with, happy about, frustrated by, and listening to. It means going to them in their bedrooms when it would be easier to let them hide in their phones or games or music while I read a good book. And it means when I go to them, resisting thoughts of defeat when the conversation doesn’t go well.
It also means leaving them alone sometimes. It means letting them experience trials and failure and natural consequences. It means praying fervently and hugging them and telling them I love them.
In every season of motherhood, whether holding babies or hugging young adults, we can redeem the time and rest in the power of the gospel. It looks different at each stage, but it's the same thing we need to do in every phase of mothering. We labor and are stretched to continue reaching for our children’s hands, not clinging to them, but placing them in the nail-scarred hands of the One whose love for them is more fierce and pure than ours.
[1] John 2:3–5
[2] C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Harvest Books, 1971), 10.
