Undoing

What will you do with yourself?

I don’t know if she had asked the question I was trying to answer, but I found myself drilling down into some complicated feelings about the space left over once my youngest child goes off to college. 

My mother-in-law is a sharp lady; she knows this would be a question for me and not her son. But I feel sharp, too. In all the wrong ways, perhaps. All edges and elbows. 

She shared her experiences and gave a tidbit of good advice: ” Reclaim something you had to give up.“ 

I hate how it sounds when it tumbles out of my mouth; how everything always sounds whenever I try to bend words into a shape that fits me: “I don’t feel like I sacrificed anything for my children.” 

As if I fear, by definition I won’t ever be able to fit into anything else. 

I try again: I never gave up anything that I truly loved. If anything, I found more and more things to do as the children grew into adolescents.

Even the word - adolescents - feels like a time when adults are supposed to step a few paces back. 

All of it felt like a surprise, or just a thing I learned about myself by giving new things a whirl. I learned new skills, made new friends, decided running was fun, and then started to volunteer.

She smiled, drew a breath and wondered if the transition would be easier for me since I could already fill my time with work, hobbies, and friends. 

Perhaps it’s the thousands of little tasks that mothers don’t exactly take for granted. We labor over them, as if they were entirely new life forms to cajole and nurture into recognizable shapes. 

Parenthood was just one part of the puzzlement. 

If anything, I gained so much more from navigating the ups and downs. The friction that comes from doing or delegating the work. 

It wasn’t always a joy, but it hardly felt like a burden either. Not that it was glamorous: There is always something that needs doing: the mountains of laundry, the piles of dishes, the “omg, how long has the cat vomit been steaming over there on the carpet?”

There will still be laundry, and dinners I clean up (because I don’t cook them), and pet messes that, while deeply unpleasant, won’t make me feel the physical urge to add to the upset. 

Which is to say, there will still be a husband … THE husband. A man who might need to be disabused of the notion that he, in any way, sacrificed me to the children. Or that I sacrificed him. Realizing instead that we are still on the same path, despite how it meanders and winds through time.

If there is a new frontier, I suppose it will have many familiar hills and valleys. It won’t be exotic or remote. We will come to realize it never really “left off” anywhere to pick up again. It’s just a journey we have been on together, marveling at all of the scenery changes.