The Eighteenth Summer

And then, she leaves.

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Five minutes ago, my parents dropped me off at college. It was a blink, not a lifetime. It just happened. I remember what I was wearing—overalls, just like my daughter was today, my hair a medium-length bob, just like my daughter’s is today. My whole family sobbed in the Wartburg Chapel as the congregation sang “Borning Cry” at a ceremony apparently designed to break everyone in attendance.

What a cliche to say “I remember it like it was yesterday.” Is it more vivid because I’ve been fortunate enough to return to my college stomping ground twice in the past year? Or is it that fresh for all of us, adults reduced to stereotypes, reminiscing about the good old days while Gen Z erroneously dismisses us as irrelevant, having no idea what is percolating under the surface of our midlife exteriors?

My emotions are always, always right at my fingertips. I am “in touch with my feelings” to a nearly crippling degree. And yet, for the first time in my life, I have kept these emotions at bay. They are too much. Pandora’s Box could be dangerous. I tell anyone who asks me how I’m doing with my daughter leaving for college the truth—I am so grateful that she is leaving, I can hardly stand it. Grateful for her. Because the pain of watching her struggle these past few years has been staggering; I’ve been through several varieties of hell, but this was the one that nearly broke me. Where we are now is like the transition stage of labor: I don’t care how much pain is coming, just get. her. out, now.

I am so desperately eager and hopeful to watch her fly after years of not finding her place that my own feelings are irrelevant and I will not give them air time. Well, I did that for months. And lately, little by little, I allow them to come out, sometimes in tentative wistful moments where I realize I won’t be able to call her into my bedroom to help me with my technology problems or when she effortlessly drops one of our inside jokes, so woven into the fabric of our daily lives that I barely even notice.

Only recently have I allowed the realization to permeate, and the result is a deep chasm of grief—heavy, gut-wrenching, breathless sobs. I want her to go, yes, I do, so badly, let her fly and be free and be herself and be loved; and also, she is my person. And so now I release the pain little by little, as methodically as I can so as not to drown in it.

I have been posting updates on my Facebook page, where other mothers of teenagers and adults can empathize and hold me up. Last week I took my daughter to Swift-Tea at the Brown Palace, and shared this:

You know you’ve opened Pandora’s box of the Leaving for College tears when you make the Piano Man cry.

The first time I took her to tea was her fifth birthday. We went today to celebrate her eighteenth. And in one week, she leaves. I am so desperately happy for her, and my impending grief at waking up in house that does not contain her wasn’t even the primary reason for my tears.

It was “Swift-tea—“ Taylor Swift music played, and we went dressed in Eras themed outfits. I watched mothers and young daughters in matching gold Fearless dresses, and my tears were Pavlovian. Look how far we’ve come. Look at what happened! I had a child, and she grew up.

I jokingly threatened to whisper to one of the 1989 mothers holding her daughter’s hand, “In five seconds, she’s going to leave you.”

I blubbered to the 60-something male pianist when he came to take our song requests. He put his hand on my arm and said, “You’ll get through it. It will be hard, but you will.” When he played Happy Birthday to her and I sang along, then cried, he wiped away his own tears.

Forever and Always and Forever Winter and all the other forever songs played and I told her I wasn’t necessarily crying because I was sad. I know we are forever and ever. I believe our relationship will only get closer, that even though she doesn’t live with me, our love and connection goes on and on. But she was a five-year-old, and now she’s this magnificent being, perhaps my very favorite person to be with. Look what she’s become!

On the way home, she sang along to a Chappell Roan song I had never heard, Kaleidoscope, and she gently tolerated my silent tears as I listened. She is absolutely a delight of stardust, and she will forever and always be my child.

Later that week I gave in to primal, keening sobs as we went to the pediatrician for the last time. Just days before that visit, I crouched on the exam table, hovering over her holding her iPhone as it played an episode of Impractical Jokers to distract her during a pain injection. I joked and comforted her and tried to ignore memories of her first immunizations as a newborn, her fierce wails unleashing a desperation in me I had never before experienced, knowing my milk was the only thing that would calm her. I went to bed exhausted from the weeping. Soon she will not wake up across the hall from me. In the morning, terrified by the isolation of my sadness, I took to my Facebook page again.

Three days until she goes. I let myself have a day of ugly, wracking sobs. I asked whether I was required to do that; to really force myself to go there, imagine her as a baby and me dropping her off at kindergarten with my mascara in my purse to apply when I got to work, belly swollen in my final month of pregnancy.

I woke up and asked if it was my duty to force myself to marinate in what we had, what was forever lost, sacrificed at the altar of parenthood at which we all worship, hoping and praying we’ll make it to this moment when we get the honor of releasing them, knowing we did our jobs, this particular cycle is complete, we get to watch them soar now.

If I take my heart on a montage of her life, it will inevitably require me to also grieve what was lost in a divorce that I chose. Does a person have the capacity for that kind of mourning, mourning the entirety of a childhood, a life, an era?

I say this knowing that nothing is really lost. If we are lucky, we get to keep our children. But there is no escaping the series of micro-losses that is the cellular makeup of motherhood. We lose every version of them over and over, minute by minute, year after year. We get to keep exactly none of it. Except in our memories and photos and hearts, the gorgeousness of their grown up selves, in which those nesting doll childhood versions we long for still reside.

Do we force ourselves to sit with the enormity of the loss and the honor and the gift, talking ourselves through cliches and mantras about how this was always how it was supposed to go, roots and wings and forever our children and the bond grows and grows and evolves as we do?

Or do we make the coffee and do the yoga and clean up the yard and pay the bills and pack the car, convincing ourselves that it isn’t as significant as all that, she’ll just be gone for a while? She’ll come back.

I was on the radio last week talking about a show I was producing later in the week, and I referenced midlife as a second adolescence. It really is, isn’t it? Not just the storm of hormones, but the precipice of reinvention. And in many ways, it feels delicious. I feel grateful I’ve had the opportunity to reclaim myself in so many profound ways these past few years.

I remember reading an article called 18 Summers about seven years ago. (Don’t read it, you guys.) I instantly began frantic mathematical calculations to assure myself that even though my daughter was eleven, I was really only halfway through the school years. It was a panic-driven, irrational math designed to convince myself there was plenty of time left. She was only going into sixth grade, so really, half of the school years still remained! I would be ok. There was still so much time.

But time is an illusion and a thief and a liar and all that other shit. Because that day that I stood in the driveway watching my girls ride bikes and foolishly consoling myself into thinking I had all the time in the world—that was just five minutes ago. And the day my parents left me in my dorm room was just five minutes ago. And in five more minutes, my youngest will leave, too.

I do not grieve this in the way you might think. I love my children more every day, and I enjoy them with a delight and connection that is deeper and more rewarding than our time together when they were babies. Those moments were sweet, and I occasionally crave them, but I do not want to live there again. I love having teenagers.

And that second adolescence of midlife? It’s pretty fucking fantastic. I know myself better than I did during actual adolescence, I like myself more, and I honor myself in ways I never could then. Midlife is gorgeous and freeing and rewarding and exciting, and I never would have believed it when I stood in my driveway frantically calculating how much time I had left with my girls.

I never would have believed I would genuinely savor this stage of life when I was trying to have a third baby, calculating whether maybe by the time my last child left, I would be a grandmother, let the oxytocin circle be unbroken! I would never have believed it when I was 32 and trying to conceive; I read the Dance of the Dissident Daughter and thought Sue Monk Kidd must be lying or masking her sadness when she said birthing her book felt as sacred as birthing a child. Could anything ever come close to carrying a baby? Such hubris, to pity Sue Monk Kidd, for Christ’s sake!

But it’s true. My girls are teenagers, and one of them is moving out this week, and my life goes on in a beautiful new way. I will likely also ache in a way I cannot yet conceive of, and as I always do, I mourn ends of eras. I mourn them hard. But fortunately for me, my role model is Taylor Swift, and she has built an empire around the seamless, glorious integration of all her Eras into one radiant self. The Era of Mommy and Izzy and Sophie at home may be ending, but I will always break out that particularly sweet acoustic guitar set when I’m on tour, as it will always live inside me.

***Check out upcoming offerings and events here, including a beautiful back to school rejuvenating workshop (visit Sunny Isle yoga online to book; Early bird pricing ends Wednesday!) for local mamas and intimate writing circles.**

XOXO,
Steph