Melancholy

Today I find myself in quite a pitiful state. Not completely happy and not completely sad but some strange place in between.

Prim started her first day of preschool today. Yes, she began last year but it was only two days a week and this year she will be gone four days a week. As I watched her go into her new class, after just yesterday waving goodbye to G as he began his second grade year, I lamented over how quickly it has all gone.  Time is quickly passing me by and I fear that I haven't captured it enough, remembered enough.  I worry that the little things that make having a child so precious are going to be forgotten.

My expectations have had to shift since May. You see, at this point I hoped to be pregnant, just in the beginning stages of showing off a baby bump.  How it hurts my heart that I do not have this small gift to carry along with me.  I didn't think it would hurt this much but in the quiet of my own mind today I found myself longing for what seems to be missing.

Is it supposed to feel like we're always saying goodbye? Goodbye to expectations, goodbye to our children as they grow a year older, goodbye to a season that we thought would outlast our dreams.  I ask God so often why, why, why that I wonder if He's still listening. But maybe it's me who's not hearing.  I read His Word that says:

In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith-of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire-may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.  1 Peter 6-7

and not only do I think of my own trials; this deployment, infertility and a small brood growing older by the minute, but I think of the people that I see around me who are suffering and I feel overwhelmed.  A friend of mine often posts on Facebook about about a family who just lost their daughter to an aggressive form of brain cancer. She was five. She was alive one day and the next she was gone, resting in the arms of Jesus.  Or I read Mary Beth Chapman's new book about losing her daughter, Maria, and I think to myself, is this what perspective looks like? How can I possibly feel this way with what they have suffered through?

Maybe it would seem easier if H were home.  Him being gone only magnifies the loneliness and I know that he would stand next to me and say "they're getting so big, where did the time go?"... And then I think of him being seven thousand miles away and not being able to kiss them goodbye on their first day of school or hug them when he gets home. Again-perspective.   

I know tomorrow will be a new day and the goodbyes won't feel quite so difficult. And maybe in November, when there is a welcome hello they won't seem so harsh to begin with.  But for now, I pray that I will be proven faithful and that He always be in it...