Last night I stood in the kitchen with Chad and asked him if he thinks my brain is working okay. I had had two incidents in the past couple of days of not being able to think of simple words that I was trying to use. We faced each other by the sink, and my eyes filled with tears, and he joked and then gave me a quiz on things I should remember. The good news is that I could remember the model and make of my first car, the names of people we haven’t seen in years from our distant past, and who the president was when I was born. A few moments before, I was afraid I was losing my mind, but in true Chad fashion he reassured me and made me laugh and proved to me that I’m not losing my memory quite yet.

I’m just scattered.

It feels like the theme of our life right now. Our older children are each going in their different directions, making decisions, taking trips, working jobs, and we looked at the calendar here with just a few weeks of summer left and tried to get a few days of fun scheduled. We quickly realized that there wasn’t a single day open when all six of us could go do something together. Just like that, summer is evaporating, and then two will move away to college and one will start high school and one will start pre-K and the other two of us will just keep holding on for dear life.

It’s a strange feeling when you shift from having a tight little family unit that moves through the world together to this scattered collection of human beings who wave to one another from a distance. In some ways it feels like I’m picking up pieces of a former life I once knew and trying to make them fit into a new puzzle. Those pieces don’t connect anymore, and my brain is trying to keep up with the change.

But my heart knows. While my mind flits around from one to-do list to the next, my heart remains laser focused on reality. Our family is, one-by-one, launching. And each time one of them jumps from solid ground into the boat, I’m the one who has to find my footing again. There’s so much disorienting joy in it.

One thing I know about motherhood is that it never stops pressing me into my Savior’s side, whether I run to Him with a crushing hug of gratefulness and praise or I fall into His arms in desperation or even a longing for what used to be but isn’t anymore. While my family shifts and changes around me, Jesus stays right where’s He’s always been. When I’m scattered, He gathers. When I feel shaky, He reminds me there’s solid ground beneath my feet. When I’m teary-eyed in the kitchen, He fills my mind with good things. And when my children strike out into the world, He gets into the boat with them.

As we stood in the kitchen and Chad gave me his memory quiz, I realized that I have never in my life known some of the things he was asking me about. It made me laugh, because there are a great many things to know in this world, but only a few really matter. My thoughts may be scattered and my memory may or may not be what it used to be, but Jesus is always reminding me of what I need to know: He is good. He is here. And He is always gathering my pieces.