I’m pretty sure we’re breaking up.
It’s been a long time coming.
The thing is we have a child between us.
Himself.
Which means just like divorced parents, we’ll always be connected.
But we’ll need to find new ways of relating beyond the swiftly outdated dance of dependence & provision.
Extracting two beings from we who had once been one.
Inside this never-ending flow of love & letting go.
Our community came together one day in June to raise the frame of our home–along with 3-year-old Aidan who spent the day hammering nails into the floorboards of what would be our kitchen; and 8-year-old Lloyd who knelt beside his preschool & primary teachers laying down the floor to what would become his bedroom; and Casey, age 38, who lifted beams with friends & family (and even strangers) to realize a dream come true; and me, age 40, who never had the chance to live in one place very long and who climbed the frame at the end of the day and tapped an evergreen branch to its peak while everyone cheered below.
14 years have passed.
14 Christmases.
14 wedding anniversaries.
14 winters & springs.
14 summers.
14 autumns.
Over the years, Casey spoke of needing an addition—the living room was always too small; but I countered that the boys would be gone someday and the house was already too large for two.
“Someday” has somehow arrived.
What was “raised” to be a home for 4, becomes a home for 2 at the end of summer—which is almost as unfathomable as building this home for ur family once was.
I borrowed my son from his bedroom for his height–to remove a grasshopper from the inside of the screen door off my bedroom.
He hesitates, so I press, “Just lift it up and put it outside!”
Aidan is absurdly afraid of spiders, but grasshoppers?
He is also an engineer.
(Well, a 17-year-old with an engineering mind.)
He taps the screen and the grasshopper jumps onto the glass door.
“Now what!” I say, aggravated with the delay, but he only smiles.
He quickly pulls the screen closed so that the bug is on the outside of the glass door without return access.
“Engineering,” he says, with pride.
Relieved, I return to folding laundry, but distracted, Aidan remains at the door, which has become a specimen jar–eye to eye.
“Come look!” he says.
But I am not interested in grasshoppers–the whole point was to get rid of the grasshopper. But this is his last year at home.
“Watch,” he says, giggling, as the grasshopper pulls down its antenna, like a girl playing with her hair.
Each time Aidan laughs, the grasshopper does it again.
“He must be a comedian,” I say.
“He’s looking right at us,” Aidan says.
“Doesn’t it seem like he’s wearing a metal shield on his head?”
“Exoskelton,” Aidan says.
(He is also a scientist.)
I don’t know how to get from this story to what I want to say.
It’s a leap, like the grasshopper made from the door back into the world.
I’m grateful for this pause with Aidan and the grasshopper for the way it reminds me to stop trying so hard.
Like the Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön says:
There’s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, we would be happy.
I want to know this.
In my bones.
The Empty Nest Diary 