Major Undertakings

Matthew submits his papers today for going on a mission, so Tom put a map on the wall to visualize pins as our represented guesses of where he'll serve. 

Matt wants to go foreign and to learn to speak another language. So far all girl cousins have gone to France and all boy cousins to Mexico, so there's pressure to guess Mexico.

I'm silently guessing Australia, though. Tom served there, and there's no justification to my imagining someone left behind from his mission who Matt can go, search, and find. 

Maybe he'll go to Germany, England, or Ohio to go, search and find our ancestors.

All the ideas in my head are many and messy and my unending judgments around my ability to foresee the future are keeping me from committing to putting a pin on the map just yet. 

Meanwhile, Tom and Matt took Friday-Sunday on the Payette and Boise River in search of fish and isolated time together before Matt leaves on his mission and his absence shifts our very roots. 

As a parent, you constantly balance the unlocking of independence in your children. It's exciting even. For instance, we celebrate the moments our children sit up, crawl, walk, score a goal in soccer, give a speech accepting an award for good citizenship, and get accepted to serve a mission, into a college or into a trade school.  

But no one talks about or prepares you for the messy and inevitable void you feel after your child leaves home, which takes a disproportionate amount of time to heal, by the way. If you want to know how disproportionate, just imagine what it might be like and multiply that by the sum of all the moments you celebrated with them while they were growing up. 

It's somewhere close to eleventy million. 

So as soon as the wall map went up and Tom and Matt took off this weekend, I started distracting myself with more house projects like repainting my whole kitchen. 

House projects take hard work, are messy, and infinite just like life. Or families. Or anything that's of considerable importance. 

But I'm unhealthily obsessed right now with wall textures. It's hard to see from this picture (see close up below), but I've completely retextured this whole wall and hallway removing the ugly orange peel that builders leave to haunt and deprive nearly all homeowners. 

I strained to work on the wall while balanced on a ladder most of Saturday to rid my house of ugly walls and prep them for new paint and now my body is yelling at me.  Regardless of the resulting aches and pains, however, I'm satisfied with my effort so far and even energized as I estimate how much more work is needed during this major undertaking. 

So while we add guesses to our wall map from friends and family and while we prepare for Matt to leave, and regardless of the inevitable void that's coming, I'm satisfied with my effort so far and even energized by the mission and work still needed during his major undertaking.