The Changing of the Wheat

Vincent Van Gogh, Wheat Field with Cornflowers, 1890

"Now you'll have a majority boy household, Mom," said my oldest, surveying the shipwreck of laundry in my room left from the two big daughters sifting their belongings from the family baskets.

And it's true. For the first time in twenty years, we'll have more boys than girls. Three boys, two girls left at home -- I'm practically an empty nester. There are other firsts, too. For the first time in twenty years, I'm not changing diapers. My youngest has finally made the total shift to being a big potty-user, taking himself even, and I am hungrily eying the real estate occupied by the rickety changing table, used when I got it two decades ago. My oldest son, almost 14, ready to move out of a three-boy bedroom, has claimed the attic room his oldest sister had been occupying. Suddenly, no girls are sharing rooms. Each girl has two beds in her room, but the 16yo prefers her privacy, and now the 12yo will not be kept out of her room by her older sister's phone calls or visitors. 

Now I have no drivers in the house, as the 16yo can't get her license until September. Now my babysitting situation is changing, but I also have no babies. Now part of my heart is in Kansas, at Benedictine College, which is not a convenient three hours away like Franciscan in Steubenville. Now people who meet us will only see five kids, and not even know about the two older ones. 

Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, produces much fruit. The grain of wheat dies once, but we die over and over again. Unless, of course, what is dying is the new grain, the fruit of the previous dying. What dies is not the old, but the new, and we go on dying and multiplying until we have brought forth thirty- or sixty- or hundred fold. Or seven-fold -- that's enough for me.