With the nest almost empty now, my parenting insights come in shorter bits which I suppose is just about right as I turn more & more toward other things…
And yet, I’m learning that this role is the role of a lifetime…
~
Payback Theater
That rare night when he goes to bed before us. A dramatized rendition of what we endure night after night. Door latches. Stairs. Lights. A sudden desire to share scientific discoveries, insights, intimacies.
~
IN A FAMILY WAY
It’s such a comfort, this being a family. A buffer. An ease. A certainty. Sweet. Exhausting. Consuming. Distracting.
The silence, after, is deafening. Resurrecting. The original. Sin. Of separation. Abandonment. Mortality.
There is this larger family. This shared dwelling. This belonging.
There is this whole.
Past. Present. Future.
One.
~
OUR TURN
My state is proposing a 24-hour waiting period to buy a handgun.
Here’s an idea. Until this country figures out its shit when it comes to guns, men are unable to purchase them, and women are in charge of any firearms in the home. Furthermore, public funds are provided to women for firearm training and to provide the necessary equipment for safekeeping. Additionally, all new hires in positions that require firearms will be women until such time that a 50/50 gender balance is achieved in police departments, security teams, military personnel, etc. Public funding will also post armed women at every school, church, and each of the other venues that the men of our country frequent to kill people begrudgingly and at random.
You’ve had our vote, our money, our bodies. We’ll have your guns.
~
FROM THE MOUTH OF BABES
”It’s like the release of a new iPhone. Is it going to be good, and are we gonna like it, or is it just gonna be the same thing without a headphone jack?”
Our youngest, on the Mueller Report
~
APOCALYPSE
You know how if your kids are plugged in–at home or in the car–you gain some well-deserved solace, but it’s bittersweet because they’re checked out, like that rambunctious kid in your classroom on Ritalin, or the outlying boroughs of NYC, silenced by the seduction of indoor screens, or the neighborhood of my childhood on the base at West Point, the roads in front of the homes now three times as full with oversized SUVs obscurring the view of the Hudson, while the sidewalks and the playgrounds and the woods, once sprinkled with kids, are barren, even on a perfect July day, like the ghost town we visited when we lived in the Rockies, or the Apocalypse we inhabit now–quieted, distracted, consumed.
The Empty Nest Diary 