Kissing Her Good-Bye

My eldest daughter left Friday for a mission trip to South Dakota. She’s up in the frozen tundra (that’s what South Dakota is like in my mind…that’s right, isn’t it?) building houses with Habitat for Humanity and her Church youth group. It’s weird to not have her here. It’s even stranger to not be able to hear from her except in the occasional text message. (Spotty coverage and they don’t want them on their phones all the time) I miss her terribly and worry about her all the time. She’s only 16 and out on her own. Surely that’s too young to be away from her mother.

Except it’s not. Not really.

Every time I worry about her, I think of my own Great-Great-Grandmother who was married at 15 and on a boat headed for America. She left her native Germany behind with her new husband, a man she’d known only a few months. She never saw her mother’s face again.

Her own son, my Great-Grandfather, left home at 14 to go find work as a cowboy in the wilds of Texas. (It really was wild at that time.) He walked away from her house to do one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet, and she never even knew he was going until he was gone. (It happened in those days. Can you imagine?) His mother never knew what became of him, as best we can tell. She died a few years after he left and I’ve read that she looked for him every night. She watched the horizon to see him and his brothers riding back to her. (That’s right. THREE of them left this way.)

So while the thought of my beloved daughter being such a huge distance away makes me ache with the missing of her, at least I know where she is and that she’s headed back to me in two weeks. I keep reminding myself that in ages past she’d be a woman already. She’d be grown and striking off on new adventures, perhaps a world away. I hugged her good bye knowing that it wasn’t forever. I’m so grateful for that knowledge.

I just can’t get the moms from my family’s past out of my brain though. How did they do it? Was their faith that great? Was their hope so sure? Did they know it was forever, or did they hold a wish in their hearts to see their babies again?

I hope they are praying for me for the next week plus a bit. I could use their strength to see me through.