I had years to prepare.
That is the irony. I had the whole of childhood to watch the leaving approach, to see it coming down the calendar like a weather system you track for years, that you know is coming, that you have made every practical arrangement for, the savings account, the university visits, the conversations about laundry and budgeting and how to talk to a doctor when you are far from home and feeling like you might be sick.
I was prepared for every practical thing.
I was not prepared for the particular quality of the silence.
Not the absence of noise, I knew there would be that. I was prepared for the noise to stop. What I was not prepared for was the texture of the silence, which is different from quiet, which is not peaceful in the way that the books about empty nesting promised me it would be peaceful, which is instead a specific silence shaped exactly like the person who is no longer filling it, a silence with a particular weight and temperature and smell, a silence that knows what it is missing and says so.
I had told myself I would enjoy it.
That is the lie I want to examine. The lie that the freedom would feel like freedom immediately. That I would wake up the first morning to the absence of morning chaos and feel relief rather than this particular hollowness, this sense of a purpose that has been central to everything suddenly asking to be renegotiated, to be replaced with something, only I do not know yet what the something is and that is the actual work, the work no one puts on the preparation list.
The preparation list does not include: figure out who you are when you are not primarily someone’s mother.
It should.
I am working on it. I am being honest that I am working on it, which is more than I could have said in those first weeks when I was telling everyone I was fine and fine was not a lie exactly but it was not the whole truth either and this is the whole truth: I thought I would be ready and I was not ready and that is allowed and I am doing it anyway.
