Once Upon A Time

-

 Today, my boy moved into the dorms for his freshman year of college. It has been a long and hard week, of unbloggable things, and I have been worried beyond my skin for him. He has had to carry so much in his 18 years without a lot of opportunities to be himself. I have held him like I held him as a baby, let him sob in my arms, promised him I'm not going anywhere, we aren't going anywhere. This is always home until he chooses it not to be. He is six miles away, at a dream school, the kind of school I went to. We walked through the art studios today, the music practice room. Met his roommates. 

I know. I am not special in this, nor unique. Kids grow up, grow away. This child has been the project of my life, the through line that has kept us both afloat, my love for him, my fierce determination to build a better life for us. I did not know myself until I had him; I did not know how to say no, or even how to say yes. I knew how to be something for other people, something I am unlearning (and he is now unlearning).

I came home, and walked three miles into the gloaming. R. and D., who leaves in three weeks, are watching television inside. I am on the porch, doing my best not to text my boy, as are you okay are you okay are you okay. Tomorrow I will go back to campus for the second day of parent orientation (which, let's be honest, after 24 years in higher ed, I don't really need, but promised J. I would be on campus for him) and will then drive to opera rehearsal three miles down the road, will fold him in my arms and promise him it will be okay.Nothing is an insolvable problem i told him today. No matter what, we can figure something out. I promise, I promise, I promise.

There are unsolvable problems, of course. But he has had enough of those. He is six miles from home, he can come home whenever he likes, he is undergirded by a village of the ferocity of my love and the love of those I have loved. 

Every fall I am heartbroken I no longer have students. Every fall I am reminded how lucky i was to once get to work with them, and hope I will someday get to do so again. And now my boy is one, and I can feel myself 27 years ago, walking into K-College, terrified and excited and desperately afraid. 

On my walk today, evening rising up from the dry grasses, I passed house after house where families were eating dinner inside: children playing and parents talking. God, I miss my small boy. How I could gather him up into my arms--but even then, post divorce, my love couldn't fix everythhing. How he navigated terror and loneliness even then.  God, I am so grateful I have had the opportunity to be his mother.

May he be okay. May he know he is loved. May he know joy.

May he be himself and know that whoever that is, he is loved. He is accepted. He is always, and forever, my Bird. No matter what.

on my walk, anxiety at a 111,111,111,111,111/10




entrance to campus

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

High Summer, Still

-
Image
 In so many ways I have built the life I have always wanted: I come home to a safe house, my child is content in his life, has a community (stayed out far past midnight at a park watching bats darn the sky near the river with friends); I sing, I am doing theater again, I run--though less than I did. Summer is starting its long, slow lean toward fall. We aren't to the hottest parts yet, but the lawns are all yellow and the light is pink at night and baby orb weavers have begun building webs everwhere. I walk down the stairs with a spider stick each morning, carefully unknotting one end of a web from one side of the stairwell, letting the little orange spider clamber into the rosemary. An  hour later, the web is back. Some are slung twenty, thirty feet above the street between the deodar and the yellow cedars.  In three weeks, R. and I head up the mountain to write. I love that week, our world just river nad tree and scree and words. In less than a week, I need to put down ...
Read more

Spring and All (redux)

-
I have been trying so hard to write, to think these days. I am so busy. My job doubled in January, quite literally. This is tech week, and then opening night for the opera and I just finished the penultimate chamber choir tour of the year.   It has been one of the most beautiful springs I've experienced in Portland--vacillating between warm and floral scented, and wet and chilly. It has been perfect.  I've dug another pond in the garden, I've gotten a 20 cubic yard chip drop that i've hauled up the 30 steps, 5 gallon bucket by 5 gallon bucket.  I can't sit still, I bake bread and make occasional dinners. R. is working two jobs, 7 days a week, and some nights when we finally fall into bed, it's the first time we've been still together. Two years ago, I was almost as busy--opera and choir and J. graduating from high school and publishing my third book, and then those disastrous months in late summer and fall, where the world fell apart. Then a year ago, I was ...
Read more

High Summer

-
 When J. was young, and I was still teaching, summer was languid--long hot days in our little Moorish apartment or in the house on Grosse Pointe, cicadas and humidity, trips the Lake, long hours we spent simply being with one another, hot and sticky, pointing the hose at the dogs, lying on the basement floor while tornado sirens wailed over the green skies. There were also those nights that J. would be at his father's where I would drink myself into a stupor, sit in my office or the little front porch or at the dining room table watching evening seep up from the reservoir woods, write poems or blog posts, so deeply sad and lonely but also free. Then, I often felt guilty for the few days or hours that J. would be gone and I would be young and free. I went on dates, or spent the night with various boyfriends, went to movies or played poker with H. and D. I knew none of that would be possible if I had J. all the time, but I wished for it desperately. Summer was a stretch where he was ...
Read more