Leaving and Cleaving.

Wedding bells chimed in the Coty household this weekend. My only son, Matthew, hitched his star to that of the lovely Rebecca, the new Mrs. Coty (I'll have to get used to this - I've been the only Mrs. Coty since my mother-in-law passed away years ago).

It was both easier and harder than I thought it would be.

Easier in that Rebecca is immensely efficient and took care of all the details without burdening me in any way.

I love that about her - she's so thoughtful and knows this has been a very busy time for me with a recent book release. It really was quite simple ... I pretty much just showed up and enjoyed. A vast difference from the exhaustion of planning and carrying out and cleaning up after my daughter's wedding a few years ago.

But it was harder than I thought it would be to watch my little buddy (regardless of the fact that he's now a head taller than me) award his heart to another woman. I thought I'd worked through all that. After all, he's twenty-nine years old and has been living away from home a decade. He's had girlfriends, most for years at a time. Girls I learned to share his heart with. For a time.

But this one's for all time.

As I watched him kneeling, tuxedoed and handsome, at the unity candle altar, I suddenly flashed back to Captain Buttertub, our nickname for 3-year-old Matthew who loved to run around the backyard in his Spiderman underpants, an old buttertub from the sandbox jammed upon his little blond head as he fought valiantly with his stick-sword to protect his mama from invisible villains.

And now he's vowing to protect someone else from the world's invisible villains.

I know our motherly job is to raise our children to this end, that they will fulfill the biblical mandate to leave their childhood homes and create a new home, cleaving to their wife in adulthood as they did their mothers in infancy. I know. I know. But still it aches somewhere in a hollow place deep inside.  

It was a happy/sad moment that only mamas can fully comprehend.

Sniff.