Author Katrina Kenison joins us in the reshaping of the nest in her new book “the gift of an ordinary day,” 2009 by Springboard Press. Katrina is the previous author of the well known Mitten Strings for God~Reflections for Mothers in a Hurry.
I’ve made a fast read of this mother’s memoir and marked dozens of pages along the way. The Gift of an Ordinary Day is as much a book about letting go as it is a book of finding oneself and understanding the beauty of each day.
Most poignantly, I resonated with this passage on our shifting roles,
The work my friends do now that their children are grown is so indisputably the work of mothers, of women whose passionate maternal energies, no longer required at home, are lovingly offered up to the world instead.
As Kenison prepares to send her first born off to college, she write these words which brought my own grief to the surface,
…Releasing our children into their grown-up lives is piercing in a way I could never had imagined when my sons were small…Watching my older son embrace his future, I see not only the bittersweet end of one chapter, but also the first exciting glimpse of a whole new life–his.
The Gift of an Ordinary Day brings tears, gasps, laughter, knowing and most poignantly this realization of parenting our growing children,
Love, I’m beginning to understand, is the only thing I really need to hold on to after all.
Kelly Salasin, October 2009
The Empty Nest Diary 