Hair, Border, Ray Carver

(August 10)

A month ago, I cut off all my hair. Or most of it. I plan on cutting the rest of it in another month, before things start up and the churn of academia begins again.

In a week and a half, J. leaves for college. I am not sure I can talk about this yet. I am not sure I can think about this yet. Today, at my annual pap smear, my midwife (whose youngest is also heading off to college in a few weeks) fist bumped me and said, Girl, we did it.

On our walk today, J. and I saw a leucistic heron or a great egret floating above the neighborhood. The olden dog snuffled through dry weeds, the dog we adopted when J. was barely two, in my little apartment in Kalamazoo. Then, my hair was short too: a friend had cut it on their porch after a particularly ridiculous breakup, when I'd run to E. and K.'s because I knew it was safe, because I knew they--my queerest of queer friends--were my people in a way other folks weren't. 

I didn't feel safe enough to grow my hair out until the pandemic. My work profile picture is me, with my hair to my waist. This is because R. is safe, isn't a man I need to fear. That is a new thing. Until him, I didn't understand that I could be involved with a man who would not harm me. Who would not control me. He has shown me that it is possible, has shown our boys it is possible and normal. J. eschews normal gender roles. The person he is dating uses they/them pronouns and for him that is normal and usual. My god, I am so glad we moved here. For all the reasons.

When my hairdresser cut my hair off a month ago, I felt like myself in a way I hadn't felt in a long while. 

I cannot imagine my life where being a mother isn't the driving force. I know how to serve others. I know how to find my worth in what I can do for someone else.  But also: something is ahead of me where I walk into my solitary life again. Where my boy walks into his, though not without my undergirding, without my fierce love and support. But, he is moving toward adulthood and I am emerging into whatever is next. I am still a mother, but different. I am still a caregiver, but different. 

R. and I have never been without our kids at home. He sends me a budget, he lays his hand on my hip at night. 

If your PAP is normal you don't have to have another for 5 years, the midwife says. For almost 20 years I had a PAP every 3 months, then 6 months, then yearly. We did it, she says. 

On our walk, J. says  you can't be a helicopter mom when I am in college because I don't have to listen to you. When we get home, he scoops up the olden dog in his arms and carries him up the stairs, hugs me hard before he disapears upstairs to his bedroom. 

I know I can be a lot, I say on our walk. Yeah, he says. That's okay.

*

(August 17)

One week from today, he leaves for college. He is only going across town and we have had a decade of being separated by thousands of miles. The sky is pink, the heat has broken. Crows have started gathering in crowds again, the fledglings grown into young adults, and the small families of the summer are joining with thousands of their fellow birds. A river of them flows each night from east to west. The sky is pink, the air is soft. All week it has been over 100, the new normal. I read about PFAS and rain barrels, harvest squash and the first tomatoes, stand with the hose at night and soak the soil. The grass is yellow, the garden is dry and gone to seed. In a month we will have no children at home for months at a time, these fledglings. 

In the mornings, I wake and pull on my running shoes, run through still-hot air, a thin morning sky. In the evenings I water the garden and work on J.'s blanket and lift weights on his weight bench inherited from R. A pile has grown in the dining room of college things: comforters and toiletries and shower caddies.  I think: we will need to pack this. At work I burst into tears during another meeting where I am told I must do impossible things. My new boss, only here for a year, reaches over and tells me let's work together to figure this out. I am going to help you with this. What you are saying is valid. I cry because I do not know how to handle compassion directed at me from a boss.

One week from today he leaves for college. R. and D. are in the living room, watching a Lego competition show and discussing the Levant. J. is in his room playing chess on his phone. The smell of whatever the neighbors are cooking drifts across the porch where I am nursing a glass of whiskey, where I am crocheting a blanket, where I am trying to write my way into this place in my life. Our life. My life. I miss my old therapist, not the one I fired or the one before that, but the woman in Michigan whose office was filled with crystals and knickknacks and who first told me that maybe, just maybe, I wasn't crazy. That was the last time I cut my hair short, when my life was turned upside down. 

His father sent him a box with four eight packs of Kraft Mac n Cheese, a box of condoms, several wrist bands for weightlifting. I suppose this is his way of trying. When J. was twelve, his father put a box of condoms into his Christmas stocking as a joke. I bit my tongue. I cried at work. R. is putting a pot of water on to boil for dinner, the cats curl near the screen door and the olden dog flops onto his bed, panting.

Transition times are always the hardest. I remember being J.'s age, unaware I had an anxiety disorder, how terrified and excited I was. How that first quarter my freshman year I wanted to transfer, was so desperately homesick I thought I would die. And then how I never wanted to come home again, how I loved being my own person (though I'd give that up for ten years, I found it again at 30).  I cut my hair. My boy lifts weights and the sky is pink and I promise him: I am always here. I love you through anything. I nurse my drink and the heat wave breaks and crows steam westward and the air smells of cedar, of the neighbor's dinner, of the vodka sauce I made earlier and R. is heating up in the kitchen. 

One of the best short stories I have ever read is Ray Carver's "Fat"  (thanks, Di Seuss, for your Intro Creative Writing class that also changed the trajectory of my life). The story ends:

"It is August. // My life is going to change. I feel it"

Yes. This. 

Oh my boy, our lives are going to change. Let us always be small, fierce animals.