Posted in Holidays, Round Two, Teens, What's Next? (18 & beyond)

The Nest, wide open


I expected to wake cranky this morning, and I suppose I am (my youngest didn’t get home until midnight & my mother is 18 years dead), but my first thought/feeling/sensation was santosha/satisfaction/sweetness–for a job well done.

This is my last mother’s day with a child at home.

I first felt the pang of the empty nest in the shower on the morning after my oldest was born.

A month later, I began writing about this messed up love story, and years later, after both boys were in school, I began this very blog in an effort to get a jump start on the sucky ending ahead.

But that was a mistake. If I were to start name this blog now, I’d call it something else.

The Spacious Nest.

Welcome.

Posted in Insight, Mid-Life Mama, Round Two, Teens, Twenty-something, What's Next? (18 & beyond)

taking credit

Sometimes when my sons share all the things that interest them and all the things they want to do with their lives, I think to myself:

Damn, my breastmilk was good.

 

Posted in Fathers, Fragile Life, Insight, Round Two, School, Teens

Late for School

Beyond the awakening is the fragility to which i am most attuned;
Because hasn’t spring brought both love & heartache, conception & loss, burials and re-births?

How do I explain what it is to see a parent outside the highschool, pacing back and forth on her cellphone. Or another, a father, walking briskly toward the building with cleats in his arms. Or my own cheek still charged with the bristle of my son’s as he kissed me goodbye and hopped out of the driver’s seat… the car emptied of his breakfast, his music, his overbearing book bag.

I remain still. Bound to the passenger side of this empty vehicle.

Waiting? Watching? What?

The speed of time?

How suddenly the landscape becomes lush?

No matter how inconvenienced we are. These children. These lives. Ready to fly. Are everything.

Even as we let them go. Little by little. And then all at once. Holding on to the simplest ways to say:

We are.

We were once.

One.