When did it switch from merely trying to keep my children alive to actually letting them live? Was it when the long days suddenly became the short years? Or when my crow's feet started to multiply? I can viscerally remember the tending, holding, wiping, yelling, handing, pulling, easing, chasing of my active and excitable bunch of toddlers as if it were yesterday. The always chaos that could turn into dance parties or hellbent power struggles. And somehow we arrived to today where Hugh can drive and get his siblings from soccer practice, Elsa will wake up and make me an omelet, Harry will buy his and his classmates movie tickets on his phone... Observing all of the living that they are doing does nothing more than make me want to squeeze their no longer chubby cheeks and oozing thighs and to push a pause button that could cocoon us a little bit longer.
I feel a let-out seam in the fabric of my being, one where I can still mother but I am not necessarily needed, and I am trying to figure out my dance space all over again. I will still be the "Alexa" of the house (no, we don't have one and it wouldn't work here anyways!) and get called at all times of the day with someone looking for missing headphones, making an ice coffee, help with the wifi (though they know that is a futile request), can you come and get the crab out of my room?... but this new territory, rips and tugs at my heart- the heart that used to crash and burn come 6pm (the kids' bedtime back in the day.)
With an ending to summer in our now life of endless summers this feeling of bittersweetness holds excitement and emptiness as my oldest children depart our day to day lives. There are tears behind my eyes- ones that will stream when a certain song comes on or I read a line from John O'Donahue's Eternal Echos. I feel the tension in my jaw and icy air in my throat as I sip in the yesterday scenes of our living room- imagining each member involved in their own nesting of independent doing, be it drawing, scrolling, gaming, watching, reading, sleeping or patting a panting dog. My tribe has disbanded as I know it. Our on-top-of-each-other togetherness existence, with a year on this island plus 7 months of Covid quarantine in CT, is over.
I can feel my parental anxiety shifting into something more like sand falling through my fingers where it used to be more of an occasional stabbing in the gut. The up close and visceral worry is now transcended energy from dodgy FaceTime wifi connection or a short and unclear text that I'm not sure how to read. It’s going to be hard to get used to- this not reading Hugh's and Elsa's faces or feeling their energy in front of me. And as far as Harry is concerned, I have to remember how to hold space for his new autonomy and back off accordingly in the world of middle school independence, while also being mindful that he still needs nightly armpit snuggles and wants me to make his lunch.
As our numbers have dwindled, I have to center myself on the trust that these pancakes were ready to be flipped. (This is one of my favorite parenting analogies- you never really know the exact time to flip a pancake. Flip it too early and you risk an underdone and soggy side, too late and the brown crust gets too crunchy and resembles more of a cracker than a pancake.) But breakfast foods aside, to think back to the moment I had my first viable heartbeat in my uterus over 17 years ago, I never considered what this little sonogram image must have wanted to share with me. “Do you realize what you are undertaking, Mama?!? Welcome to one ginormous lesson in setting things up (ie- small lima bean sized creatures that dwell within you to start) with as much love, security and generosity you can imagine and then letting things go (real, actual, functioning, decision making humans) with enough trust and accountability to maintain their still dependent hearts.” And to think… that parents have been doing this for ages and ages.
With love and an achy breaky heart,
St. Sunshine
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