Here I sit on the old L-shaped couch, surrounded by a bulging duffel, piles of laundry, backpacks, travel information gathered for my unaccompanied minor when she flies home from camp later in July, the napping dog, the black sharpie for labeling. I've been packing and organizing all morning for our week vacationing in Asheville followed by camp pick up (Gabriel) and drop off (Beatrice) at the beloved UU camp of my youth.
It is a rare thing, to be alone in my house on a weekday, with only the sounds of foot and car traffic outside the window to give some texture to this silence. Normally I long for a morning like this. Even if it's spent doing laundry and ticking off packing list items! But damn if I don't feel melancholy today.
Also. I feel very annoyed that I feel melancholy. I mean, wtf Meagan?! This is a beautiful thing you have going here! Why you gotta mess it up with the whole heavy pit in your stomach furrowed brow thing? What a waste!
(Isn't it outrageous when we judge ourselves for feeling bad and thus feel way worse? The dreaded second arrow, it gets me every time.)
It's just that everything is changing. Frances and I have been getting all her health forms together for Princeton, and yesterday she found out her roommate assignment. Gabriel is away at camp and not here to talk with me about what to make for dinner. Beatrice is turning into a new kind of being, taller than ever, stunning me with her bright insights and new flashes of anger.
I told my boyfriend I was worried that being on my own for five years had ruined me, that maybe I'm no good at partnership anymore. Maybe I've grown too attached to my own clannish family, my own ways of doing and avoiding things. As I grow closer to him I have to contend to what it means for me, a person who was with her husband for twenty years and then alone for five, to share the fretting and pleasures of daily life with someone else. To let that someone else help! Hoo boy, that one's big. Trusting someone else to help. How strange to recognize that having to do all this shit by myself - even though I often do it through gritted teeth - is something I'm reluctant to give up. It's my shit, darn it. Don't touch it.
I mean, do! Please! Please help, please hold my hand. I'm exhausted, really. I can feel so mixed up.
Everything is always changing all the time, in fact everything has already changed all the time, and I'm just struggling to catch up and adjust. I know, I know, that's just life. Flux may be the norm for everyone everywhere all the time, but when you let the fullness of it touch you, it still rocks your world.
Sending my oldest child off to college is a fullness-of-flux kind of moment. Raising my children on my own, and before that raising them while caring for my ill husband, and before that raising them with a husband who worked way too much and left the lion's share of it to me influenced my nearly 18 year long habit of being pretty cavalier about the whole 'kids grow up' business. Like, yes. They do. They should. That's the idea. Fly little birds, fly! Can't wait to see you soar while I get back to chilling in this nest on my own, enjoying my own agenda and time and space for once.
But here I am in my empty house and I feel terrible! About two months ago, after Frances returned from a Taylor Swift concert and played me all her saddest songs, it hit me with shocking force: she's leaving. They're all leaving. I knew this, I've always known this, but not like that. I cried and cried. Frances, Gabriel, and Beatrice are the center of my world, and what will I have (what do I have) to show for all these years of pouring my heart into them once this house is truly empty? Have I written any books, become a world class therapist, done anything fancy or impressive with my time?
They will leave and I will be old and alone and unimportant. At least, that's what the dark whispering suggests when something external triggers her release within.
This moment is a bookend to those early Homemade Time years, when I was mostly staying at home with my little children and wondering how I would ever return fully to the world of adults. Could I pass as functional, productive? Could I conduct conversations with nary a reference to my children? Could I ever do the things I dreamt of doing when I kept on loving these children so damn much?
I am always keenly aware of the things I want to do and can't, because when you're working full time and parenting three children alone and have to remember trash night and figure out how to deal with water in the basement there isn't time for a whole lot else. Yet I sit here and think about the dining room full of lanky boys playing D&D, the sleepovers, the family dinners with friends, the porch sitting that leads to chats with neighbors, the way one of the kids reading on the couch next to the dog fills the room with quiet peaceful energy. And while I can't travel on my own, go off on writing retreats, read lots of novels, pick up a new instrument or spend as much time in movement classes as I'd like, there is so much here and now. So much that takes from me, and so much that fills me right back up. It's an abundance that is always changing. I might not have much to show for these overflowing days, but it's good to remember I am part of it all, and it is all part of me.
Fullness of flux, fullness of life. The thumping reggaeton and the birds singing and the whoosh of tires outside my window; a rippling current that never ends.
I've missed writing to you here.
