I taught you this.
I need to say that before I say anything else. I am not complaining. I am not asking you to come back, I am not calling this a mistake, I am saying that your going was something I put inside you on purpose, the way you put something in a child’s hands and say: this is yours. This is for later. Take it with you.
I showed you that a woman could go.
I went to Mexico by myself. You were old enough to know what that meant. Old enough to see that I was struggling and chose the going as the path through. Old enough to see me come back different, not fixed, not finished, but different in the way that tells you something true happened, something that will take years to understand but is already in the body. You watched me go and come back and you learned something from that. I know you did. I could see it in the way you looked at me when I got home, like you were recalibrating, like something had shifted in your understanding of what a woman was allowed to need and take and choose.
And now you are gone and I am home.
And I am proud of you in a way that is almost too large for the word. The pride is in my chest like a weather system. Some days it is all I can feel and it is enormous and warm and it is enough. Some days the missing sits right next to it and they take up the same space and I just have to let them, because this is not a problem to be solved, this is just what it means to have raised someone well enough that they do not need to stay.
You learned to leave from me.
I am so glad you did.
I am also still learning to stay, here in this house that is quieter than I thought I would find it, learning that staying is its own kind of going, that the woman left in the house after the children leave is not the same woman who was there before them, and she is not the same woman who was there with them, and she is someone new, and she is mine to discover, and I am trying to be curious about her rather than afraid.
