She was quoting to me the exact same chapter from the exact same book I so often use to help people understand boundaries. In the hour we spent together, my counselor said nothing new to me, nothing I myself don’t regularly say to others. And yet it was hugely helpful.

I open my hand. Etched into my nerves there are all those I love. No, love is too generic a word – more precisely, those I carry under my skin, inside my soul. When they hurt, my stomach knots into a fist. When they laugh, sunshine floods through me.

That dread of looking into a calendar so overflowing that the obligations are scribbled all over each other. That thousand-tons awareness pressing down that it can’t all be done, at least not well.

Life is hard. Why make it even harder? I don’t like stress, I hate what it does to my husband, and I fear its affect on my children. So it’s tempting to create protective barriers that ensure my preferred calm life rhythm and give the illusion of a “balanced” life. Isn’t that what we are taught to value?

It’s been 23 years since these words first pierced me with promises I didn’t understand: “Ask the Lord for rain in the time of the latter rain.” (Zechariah 10:1a)

“Miles and miles away, My Darling,” her smokey, dreamy voice breathes golden melancholy into my indigo evening. “But in the blue of morning the break of dawn has come / And I’m watching the horizon / Where yesterday has gone.”

That sobering moment when an ever-so-slight awareness from the periphery explodes into the center focus of harsh reality… when the irritating voices you try to shoo away as they interfere with your semi-slumber, finally arouse you into enough alertness that you realize they’ve already been fighting for your attention for awhile.

It happens again. That same, crippled communication where both of us are delivering well-worn lines, both of us aware that we are trapped here. Neither of us wants this. Neither of us knows how to break the cycle.

My son, my firstborn graduated high school yesterday. The awareness of letting go spent all our tears – probably a necessary catharsis. Yes, the little feisty boy who scaled every doorway and then pounced on us like a ninja is gone. Yes, I miss holding him on my lap and for a moment believing I was everything he needed.

Like the pressure of a slowly approaching tropical storm, this was a year of gradually increasing weight on my aging shoulders. Too much for one so clumsy in life, still learning to be an adult despite the spiderweb of lines on my face.

I have informed my Maker of this on countless occasions.