It's Fine / It's Terrible

On taking your firstborn child to college

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I made my therapist cry last week.

I wasn’t dismayed or taken aback by her tears. Therapists are people, too, and therapists who are mothers are hardly immune from feeling their own emotions when their clients are weeping about taking their baby to college the very next day. Her reaction, mirroring mine, probably helped me to sit with the monumental transition that was knocking quietly at my front door rather than pushing it aside to delve back into last week’s work with my inner six-year-old who was hyperventilating in the school hallway.

After having purposely kept my grief at bay for months, I had finally allowed myself to acknowledge that nobody in the entire world was connected to me in the way that my oldest daughter is. We barely need words to communicate. How could I wake up and fall asleep in a house that did not contain her?

“It’s not fair,” I complained bitterly. “We are told to nurture and protect and love these babies; they are our responsibility and we love them more than we’ve ever loved anyone. It’s our job; we’ve spent eighteen years doing this work. And then one day we are expected to just stop and send them into the world.”

That was an “angry part” of my system, imbued with a cliched, “I feel like I just got fired from a career I was told I needed to devote my life to, and now I don’t know what to do with myself.” Well, that pissed me off. I didn’t even believe that crap.

“No,” I say. I pause. I feel something else come to the surface. I remember that ever since she was a baby, I have wrestled with the ambivalence of motherhood. The disclaimers came so early: I love her so much! More than anything! I do not regret becoming a mother! Please don’t take her away! But. Something feels bad. I don’t know who I am.

I don’t want to be stuck here all day, my previously imaginative, ambitious brain now performing mind-numbing math that involves breastfeeding and bowel movements. I don’t want to balance a plate of lasagna over my sleeping baby’s head, terrified to move her in order to enjoy my dinner. I don’t want to “ruin” ladies’ night by politely asking my baffled, indignant friends to please leave because my baby will not fall asleep while they are here and I would prefer my entire day not be ruined tomorrow because honestly, sleep is the only thing that currently matters to me.

I loved her. I didn’t like this.

So I started writing and didn’t stop. I forced myself to keep indulging my desires, to preserve my identity, to have ambitions and dreams and goals and friendships and pleasure. I felt guilty every step of the way. As I have often said on The Mother Plus Podcast, I felt the guilt and did it anyway.

“I worked my ass off to preserve my identity outside of motherhood,” I feverishly told my therapist. “It was all for this moment, for right now.” Just imagine if I was taking my oldest child to college—the person I spend more time with than any other human being—and I didn’t have the scaffolding of my own life to support me when she was gone? Imagine if I hadn’t fought, nearly violently, to make time for friendships and connections. Imagine if I hadn’t prioritized my body and health. Imagine if I didn’t have work or passion or purpose? Thank god I fought so hard to keep those parts of myself. Without my sense of self intact, this loss would surely kill me.

“Forget all that shit about me having an identify and a life outside of motherhood,” I wept to someone I can no longer even recall that next day. It was the first night I saw her bedroom door closed, no light beneath it. How many people witnessed my radiant grief that week? To whom did I even speak those words? “It’s all garbage. It doesn’t matter that I have friends and work I love and a sense of self. It hurts. It’s terrible.”

She will be okay. I will be okay. Everything in my life has led me to this moment. I am ready. Midlife is a second adolescence, and mine is upon me, and it is delicious and satisfying and so much more than I ever expected it would be. This is the natural order of things. I have reinvented myself over and over. This is just one more rep.

“I’m getting tired, even for a phoenix / always rising from the ashes.” I listened to “You’re Losing Me” by Taylor Swift on repeat, mainly for those lyrics. How much more work and pain and transition? Haven’t I carried enough?

I am brave when she walks away from us. She doesn’t turn around, and I am proud of her. The wind picks up as soon as she turns to go; my youngest and I stand in the parking lot as leaves swirl around us and into us. They are cherry blossoms; they are daggers.

The sobs overtake me quickly in the car. I stop periodically, listening to our Taylor Favorites playlist, squeezing my 8th grader’s hand when I need to. I am awed by the sky. The sunset burns in the west, and the sky to the east is a curtain of black. The clouds are dark; the clouds are bright. I feel lost.

I blubber on the phone about what it felt like: “An unstoppable mass herds you towards a door that unceremoniously ushers you out of one era and into the next. It is the turn of a page. It’s that simple.”

I pull myself together. My parents are waiting at home, and tomorrow I will get in the car to drive six hours to perform in two comedy shows, returning the following day, bypassing altogether the first empty day with one child gone to college and the other at school. I am exhausted into my bones after a year of stress and heartache and chaos on the heels of a pandemic, a flood, grief, death, loss, my child’s pain.

But I can do this. I have done it; I keep doing it; I will do it. I sigh deeply. I will simply drive home and prepare to do the next hard thing. Two blinding rainbows dazzle us to the east.

XOXO,
Steph

Hey local mamas. . . whether your babes are tiny or have flown, Michele Theoharris and I want to nurture you on Wednesday evening at Sunny Isle Yoga. Details here.