Emptier Nest

This is how the world changes.

This is the moment when something shifts.

A busy courtyard.

Twilight.

One last hug. A kiss on the cheek.

Then one more, because I am not quite ready to let go.

He walks away, back toward his dorm room.

We walk the other direction.

Back to the car. Back to the freeway. Back up the 101 North for thirty miles or so to a clean, comfortable, older motel where we will spend the night before heading home tomorrow. It’s too long of a drive to manage both directions in one day.

You often don’t see these moments coming, the ones that change everything. Dropping a child off at college for the first time is an obvious one. More often, they hit you by surprise. It’s the phone call in the middle of the night, or a call from your doctor about results from a blood test or mammogram and can you please call them back as soon as possible?

The morning after we dropped my son off at college last week, I woke with a raw ache in my heart. The ache took a few hours to hit me; I was mercifully in a state of a shock after we first left him. Also, I was very tired. I somehow managed to keep the grief away. But then (of course), it hit. From now on, things would be different. And what had happened to all the years when he was with me? They were gone. They had passed. And sure, I was there with him, and we were together, but sometimes I was distracted. Sometimes, I wasn’t “there” as much as I wanted to be.

Regret. Loss. Emptiness.

Then it was time for the hotel’s continental breakfast (instant oatmeal, pastries, orange juice. The most carbs I had eaten at breakfast in years) and time to start the drive home. Somehow, the sadness lessened. I breathed through it, and soon I breathed a little easier. And I was able to remember. I remembered all the times I had been present. When I had been fully there. When we had been together.

But I miss him. I miss him and the era the years that his being at home with us represented. The time of full-time mothering. I am still his mom. Still and always will be. But it won’t be the same.

We had gotten up before sunrise to make it to his college by 4:00 pm, the assigned hour when we were allowed to drop him off with his belongings, load them into big wheelie carts that the school provided, and find his dorm room. I was cross with him a few minutes before our appointed move-in time. He was protesting a little from the back seat of the car as we crawled along through the college’s move-in day traffic about the way I was handling things. I asked him to please not talk anymore. Except maybe I did not say please and I was a little firmer than usual. Later that evening, after we had hung up his clothes and unpacked our blue Ikea bags full of shampoo and body wash, granola bars, notebooks, pens, highlighters and left him, I sent him an apology text.

“Always talk,” I told him. “You should always talk. You know that, right?”

He did, he said. Everything was fine.

It seems to be going fine for him so far.

He went to the job fair and to the club fair. He walked the labyrinth at the edge of campus (you have to love a university campus that makes room for a labyrinth on its grounds) and met two other new students who were also walking it. They exchanged phone numbers. I encouraged him to contact them again. Because people you meet while walking a labyrinth have to be good people, or at least that has been my experience with labyrinth walking. Possibly more potential for friendship there than with folks you meet at a big keg party.

(I think I am showing my age, because I do not think that anyone in college would refer to one of those gatherings as ‘big keg party.’)

He had his first classes later this week. He is taking beginning Japanese. It is the first step in a dream that he’s been carrying: going to Japan his junior year for a year of studying abroad.

What would happen if he didn’t go away? Would I want him living in the basement until he’s thirty, sitting on the couch watching influencers playing video games on YouTube? Not so much. Also, I do not have a basement.

So things were lost, but things were found. I listened to a helpful podcast this week, where the host reminded me that every ending has a new beginning wrapped up in it. Going away to college is hard. Having your last child leave for college is also hard. There’s no getting away from that. I confess that I think I would love a life where everything flowed along like the last few minutes of a Hallmark Christmas movie. All candles and happy family dinners and snow falling gently outside. Unfortunately, there isn’t much growth in a Hallmark Christmas movie world. We grow when things are hard. I am not a fan of this. Would I avoid the pain if possible? You bet! Life has a way, though, of not giving us a choice.