Next week, my daughter, Ella, turns 20, which is about how old I was in the blurry, old-fashioned photo that accompanies this post. Meanwhile, my son, Jasper, left this week for Maine Coast Semester at Chewonki, an experience I’ve dearly wanted to pass on since I learned to chop wood, do a j-stroke, overcome my fear of heights, forage for food in woods and sea, and work with a group of peers to solve intense, physically arduous challenges when I was a young student there nearly 35 years ago.
So, they’re off... my girl in NYC, running her own biz, studying at NYU, Jasper about to begin an educational experience that I’m pretty sure was made for him. All great.
And yet, for now, I feel disoriented, sad... I walk past my kids’ rooms and feel deep in my bones that while my son will come back at summer’s end for one last year at home, half of his young-man body will be out the door. My mama body knows that this is the soft launch. That the next season of life, my kids flown the nest, is beginning.
What a strange, echo-y feeling. Suddenly, the twenty years of hands-on mothering that stretched ahead of me as I gave birth for the first time, a tunnel of space that seemed impossibly long because me at fifty-three seemed then to be someone entirely distant from me at thirty-three, feels eerily ghost-like: as if the whole of their childhoods, all that sticky mess of sweet small bodies and untamable spirits and labored late-night anguish and exhaustion and irreplaceable moments of slow-motion, whole-body joy—as if they just vanished. Poof. As if this amalgam of visceral, concrete life-proof, this most unarguable anchor of nowness, is instantaneously invisible. Present, but gone.
I haven’t yet all the words for it. Just this pic of me at about my daughter’s age now, standing midway up Mt. Denali in Alaska, where I was living by myself in a tent for a few months, musing about this huge life stretching ahead of me, thinking hard about next steps... a photo I share instead of the one I didn’t take of Jasper leaving because he asked me, quietly, his eyes on mine, to put the camera down and savor the moment of goodbye instead.
