It’s 0500 and I’ve been up for an hour already. These early mornings are both a blessing and a curse as I love the quiet – the solitude of peace before the world wakes up and brings forth the chaos of the day. It’s my time to be still, to read, to drink my one cup of coffee for the day and process my life. Turns out, today is a significant day, as it is as they say “one for the books.”

This is the day I drive my daughter to college in Kamloops as she pursues a degree in science. I’m officially setting my daughter free into the world to be educated by life and consequence of choice. I am also forever entering a new phase as a parent as an “empty nester.”

…sigh.

I’m pretty proud of my kids and I think given the diversity they’ve been through, they are highly competent and well-liked kids. My goal as a mom was to give them tools to survive, to be contributing members of society and to stand and be part of a moral backbone. I am proud of who they are becoming and I couldn’t have done it without the support of family. They are fiercely independant in their own way and haven’t been lost to this mass chaos that has permeated and suffocated life from within the deepest recess’ of our society’s minds, souls, and identity.

That’s not to say they won’t have mountains of humility to navigate through struggle and consequence of choice as we all do. Couple that with some pretty big realities looming, i can not protect them from but rather encourage them in the fight.

There is one thing I’ve come to recognize in my own journey – the act of being refined by fire is both the crushing of one’s selfish ways and pride, but there is no reward like it in return freeing in spirit, identity and purpose. God is good. He is faithful….. but man o’man the molting is painful.

And so, she too shall molt.

Pray for them will you, that they stay the course when the fires ignite.

These past few years have been “One for the Books” in so many ways where nothing but the Grace of God has brought us together as a family. It hasn’t been easy. First there was the lockdowns, then the adjustment of moving and leaving my son behind in Alberta for his own pursuit of a profession, then the evacuation and my husbands journey, and lastly, the blending of our family. It’s been a few years of intense molting for all of us.

It is as my husband said sombrely yesterday, “we just became a family and now she is leaving.”

And so a new chapter begins…

God is good. Let the molting begin.