One of the games my friends and I played half a century ago was Fifty Scatter. The rules are intermingled in my brain with others like Red Rover and Kick the Can but I think the point in all of them is to run apart and come back together. There were variations involving balls, but what I recall is the thrill of hiding and being found. 

 

My twins have different forms of recreation. The other night they had five friends over, and laughed while enjoying chocolate and artichoke dip. To get music to eat by, all they needed was a voice command. I eavesdropped from another room, cherishing the last time I will hug them on their birthday for four years. 

 

Two of their guests have birthdays this week too. I remembered being pregnant with their mothers, completely ignorant of what the next eighteen years would bring. Well, not completely. They are after all not our first children. But we couldn't have been certain that our daughters would be sharing stories over sparkling water in the last months before graduation.

 

This summer the seven girls will scatter to five countries on three continents, which is at once exhilarating and terrifying. How can they choose to leave just as they are becoming women? It occurs to me that the yard I played in all those years ago is barely six hundred feet from where my girls sang along with their friends. Back then there was a grove of trees halfway between the two houses, and it took courage for me to step into the gloomy shade. Now the small forest is cut down. Plus I am taller and less intimidated by shadows. 

 

My prayer is that these precious young women will step bravely into their futures, undeterred by the dark limbs of self doubt. And I trust that the one day not long from now they will come back together.