He started it without being asked.
That is the part I did not expect. I had prepared for the adjustment of the empty nest the way I prepare for most things I am anxious about, by reading about it and talking to other mothers and developing a set of realistic expectations that included the understanding that adult children build adult lives and those lives are appropriately centred on themselves and not on the parents they came from, which is correct and healthy and the whole point of everything I tried to give him.
I had not prepared for the Sunday calls that he initiated.
Every Sunday, mid-morning, from wherever he is. The calls are not long. Thirty minutes, sometimes forty, sometimes shorter if he has somewhere to be. We talk about his week and mine and the small navigations of his life in the new city and I ask questions and try not to ask too many questions and he asks me what I am doing and I tell him and somewhere in the telling I understand that he actually wants to know, that the question is not maintenance, that he is genuinely curious about the life I am building in the absence of him, the same way I am curious about his.
We are becoming friends. That is the thing I am slowly understanding.
Not instead of mother and son. In addition to. The relationship is expanding into a new shape, adding a dimension that was not possible when he was a child who needed a mother to be a particular kind of thing, reliable and boundaried and somewhat knowable, not the full complexity of a person but the specific necessary portion of a person that a child can use. Now he can take the fuller version. Now he is interested in the fuller version. And I am learning to offer it, slowly, the way you learn any new mode of being in a relationship that has been one thing for a long time and is becoming something larger.
He called last Sunday and I was at the sea.
I picked up and he said: where are you, I can hear water. And I told him and he said: that sounds amazing. And I said: it is. And there was a small silence that was not an uncomfortable silence but a good one, the kind that happens between people who are comfortable enough to share a moment without filling it.
I am going to hold that silence for a long time.
