Category: What’s Next? (18 & beyond)

Posted in College, What's Next? (18 & beyond)

SATURDAY NIGHT SOCIAL-JUSTICE BEDTIME THEATER

Posted on by Kelly Salasin

TIME: 11:00 pm (when teenager arrives home from work surprisingly tired)

STARRING: Parental Units (who had caffeine much too late in the day)

TARGET AUDIENCE: Teenagers who wake sleeping parents–night after night, week after week, month after month, year after…

SETTING: Teenager in bed, falling to sleep.

ACT I: Open and close latch doors to bathroom and bedrooms

ACT II: Drop something. Drop something else. Drop another thing.

ACT III: Open and close drawers. Open and close drawers.

ACT IV: Go up and down the stairs. Two times. Make that 3 times.

ACT V. Walk into teen’s room and say, GOODNIGHT, after he’s turned out the lights and is falling to sleep.

ACT VI. Walk into teen’s room when he is sound asleep to show him something cool on YouTube.

CLOSING ACT: Run into teen’s bedroom and dive over his body because of a dream.

ENCORE: Call to teen for help because there might be a spider in my room.

(Countdown: just a few sleeps before he lives somewhere else and visits on weekends and vacations.)

Posted in College, Milestone Moments, Mother to Crone, What's Next? (18 & beyond)

I’ve hated this song since my kids were little

Posted on by Kelly Salasin


“Mama, give your love back to your husband.”

Such an obnoxious line from a son/song. First heard when my boys were babes, and now their birthdays make me sad, 23 & 18, the youngest leaving in ten days, the other long gone, home for a short stay to celebrate his special day.

But don’t I find myself cuddling up toward my husband more, like that guy in Maine with the old coon dog he had around the place on that bitter three-dog winter’s night.

And perhaps the most telling:

This morning I recombined our laundry after separating mine from his (and theirs), almost twenty years ago, a radical act of a new mother’s individuation then, an unexpected act of cleaving now.

Posted in College, Mid-Life Mama, Milestone Moments, Mother to Crone, What's Next? (18 & beyond)

Old Yeller

Posted on by Kelly Salasin

It turns out that I resent my children for aging out of our lives.

This is a surprise, because I was never one of those moms who wished the kids stayed little forever.

I always liked when they aged.

New beginnings and all.

And I am really looking forward to belonging to myself again. To rediscovering what that means.

So why this hostility?
This grief?

How does it hurt so much when I wouldn’t have it any other way?

These aren’t questions I’m asking my own heart. Questions that wake me into the moment so that I don’t miss it while hating them.

“I wish I never loved you at all,” I want to yell.
“LEAVE!”