This is the week that a lot of people I know have kids going off to college for the first time. Getting all their stuff together, making the trip, getting them settled into their dorms or apartments. Big steps for the little people and their parents.
I went through it last year when my youngest left for Monterey. True to form, she did not want me to go with her. She moved the week or two before actually leaving and the day of her final move, timed it perfectly so that I was on a conference call and could not even hug her goodbye. It may have been all that jagged crying spontaneously at breakfast in the weeks leading up to that day that had her decide it would be best for both of us if the long goodbye was removed from the equation.
We have a funny little thing in our family, and especially between youngest one and me: I miss you already. Just this morning, in the midst of some more argumentive times we’ve had this week, she said she wants to miss me before I go on my trip in a week.
What is this we have about missing someone even when we are with them? It sounds a little like being together with friends or family for dinner, then spending the whole time on a cell phone checking emails and sending messages to others, or even those we are with in person.
She jumped in her car and took off and I continued my conference call with my jaw dropped wide open. I didn’t know she would pick that time to leave and was at once surprised and relieved. I would have done a poor job of hugging her goodbye, probably crying a lot and saying something unhelpful.
As soon as the call was over, and after weeks of me not knowing how I might manage being all alone and missing my baby, I suddenly got over it. I went out to her room, finished cleaning it and hung up art on the walls. I put out fresh linens that I’d been saving up to make the room into a vacation retreat for visiting family and friends.
I spent the next few months with my mom visiting and that was nice. She enjoyed the new room, and then she left too. And then I was alone for the first time since a short time in college when I had an apartment and was between roommates and not yet married. I was engaged, but my husband to be lived in Northern California and I was in LA. I enjoyed that time alone and being alone again 35 years later was similar though now I’m not in a relationship, so I am truly alone.
No one to tell you when to eat, what to watch on television, when to go to bed, or when to get up. I was able to just be with myself and the two little dogs. I was able to hear the cadence of my own breathing and cycles, and see for myself what caused me to be irritable or grumpy, happy, elated. What made me laugh out loud or cry. I felt liberated and unencumbered.
I will never stop being a mom to my four children and caring for and about them. But I have learned to appreciate the nest that is mostly empty of open little mouths, instead now visited by self-sufficient adults that my children have become. They make me breakfast, take me out to dinner, and just sit and talk to me about what is going on in their lives and ask me about what I’m up to.
The nest is empty and then full, and then empty again.