Joy to the world! And then, what?

--question for meditation on the Feast of Stephen, from Make Ready the Way, A Journal for Advent and Christmas, by Jean Evans, S.M.

So where am I, this Feast of Stephen 2003, the official beginning of my New Year? I found out quite suddenly about two weeks ago. I'd had a dream, a really compelling dream that was clearly a message in symbols from something in my unconscious. And I knew that I'd had a similar dream within the past year, so I went searching for it in my private paper journal. I didn't find the earlier dream -- either I didn't write it down or I had it longer ago than I thought. But what I did find was that, at this time last year, I set some goals for 2003. They were exactly the same goals, in exactly the same language, that I'd written down at the beginning of this December. That means that in the year now concluding I experienced no personal growth. I am stagnant, stuck, walking a treadmill.

The goals are not extraordinarily difficult to achieve -- lose weight, develop as a fiction writer, clear my house of clutter, take up art again, have a more active social life. And the truth is that my life is not a disaster as it is. I have a happy home, a strong support system if trouble or tragedy should strike, reasonably good health for an overweight matron, and apparently adequate resources even though we stand at the foot of what Jane Bryant Quinn has called the Matterhorn of personal finance (college for Lynn). I'm not depressed, and I'm not sick.

But I am stuck.

Nevertheless, the architecture of my life is changing. Lynn has one semester and a few weeks to go as a high school girl. This morning her best friend's father and stepmother, who live in Utah, came over to introduce themselves and talk about what we've dubbed "Lynn and McKenna's Excellent Adventure," the post-graduation trip the girls want to take to Utah and California. Then in August it's off to college, Millersville University, my alma mater.

Lynn visited the school in early December. It's only an hour's drive from here, but it snowed that day, so much that Lynn's school was dismissed early. She left during a lull between storms and navigated through about three inches of slush. More snow fell overnight, but things were pretty clear when she was ready to leave late Saturday afternoon.

The purpose of her visit was to spend time with some of the members of Millersville's field hockey team. She was the guest of a freshman girl named Liz, a fellow Camp Nawakwa alumna. She returned visibly excited about college. The thing that most impressed her, she said, was that, unlike her experience this summer in Atlanta with the national Lutheran youth convention, which she judged "too chaperone-y," there were "no adults" around.

"Yes there were," I told her. "They were you."

So where does that leave me? By the grace of God and with the help of an extraordinary husband, I've raised a strong, independent young woman. I'm the mother of an adult child (almost), and I need to embrace my new identity.

Joy to the world! Now what?