A year ago my youngest was graduating from high school, my middle graduating from college and my oldest made their debut on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival. My youngest would be going to university in Paris in a few weeks. It appeared my work here was done. My work being the kind of mothering you do when your kids are “school age.” It was a 30 year run from oldest to youngest. I was facing those two words I’ve tried to rebrand in my mind, the “empty nest.” Oddly or maybe not oddly, their leaving of the nest had caused me to tear apart the fabric of my life each time starting with my oldest. Eleven years prior I’d dissolved a marriage and we’d sold the family home. Four years prior, when my middle left for college, another tear, another home sale. It was like I couldn’t be there if they weren’t. The atmosphere altered and now uninhabitable by me. So as my youngest packed her two giant suitcases for a grand adventure in Paris, I too packed up our house, sold my furniture and put our nostalgia in a storage unit and ripped up the seams of my life once again for a grand adventure somewhere. I really didn’t want to be there without them. I knew if I’d stayed I be in some perpetual state of waiting, which felt like a form of self-torture. I had to find who I was now. Untethered in a way I hadn’t ever been.
I was single. My parents had both passed away almost a decade ago. There weren’t any grandparents. My sister had moved to another state three years before. The relationships I’d fostered during the school age years, the ones you form because your kids are into the same things had taken different forms. The stay at home moms, or the moms who were doing remote careers before remote was a thing were making their own paths in new directions. There was quarantine which had a collateral effect on our collective togetherness. I won’t even get started on the division created by the political landscape and the tough realization that your values didn’t line up with some of your closest friends. The fabric of my personal life was frayed already.
It was just me and a big black Lab.
I’d made the decision to leave my hometown, my kids hometown, for a fresh start in Los Angeles. I dismantled my life, stuck it in storage and left. But first, so many goodbyes. Goodbye to suburban motherhood. Goodbye to a neighborhood where I’d raised three children for 28 years. Goodbye to women whose motherhood was intertwined with yours. Goodbye to my hometown, where roots are deep, grandparents generation deep. To Daisy, who’d taken some of my load as a mother for 22 years. To Ana, who’d not just been 23 years of color and cuts, but a friendship forged while carrying baby #3, a divorce, my orphanage with the deaths of my parents. To the place I’d laid my yoga mat each day to warrior two, down dog and savasana while nurturing connections for the past 10 years. To the bleachers where I’d cheered along with the rest of the parents for all of our kids collectively. Goodbye to the barista at Starbucks and the waitstaff at Villagio and don’t forget the kids at Tony’s pizza. To my next door neighbors and the little girl who called me Sally and told me she loved me. To my sister, not a real goodbye, a goodbye to the proximity of her. Goodbye to a version of myself that had been shrinking as this next iteration was emerging. And then hardest goodbye of all, the one at the apartment in Paris where I left baby #3, who’d been born just shy of my 40th birthday. Who I’d practically begged God/Universe for because I felt her missing from the ecosystem of our family, not a baby at all, a brave young woman embarking on her life.
I sobbed my way through Charles de Gualle airport and the eight hour flight back to DC and the Virginia suburb where I’d been raised, where I’d raised my kids, where my parents met in high school. Bereft, I emptied the contents of the house I’d shared with my youngest for her high school years, handing over my things to strangers on Facebook Marketplace. The best pieces of me were flung far and wide. One in Paris, one on the East Coast and one traveling the globe with a high profile concert tour. I didn’t know who I was without them.
The goodbyes took more out of me than I’d planned for. The extrication of a body from a life has deep impact on the spirit, the psyche, the soul. I needed to recalibrate and process this ending of my suburban motherhood. I took myself to my sisters East Coast beach house to recover from the dismantling of my life. To rest. To gather strength for a longer journey ahead. I hibernated like a wounded mother bear from September to March, emerging in the Spring for a cross country drive to Los Angeles.
It was time. Time to meet the woman I was becoming on the other side.