Posted in September but written three weeks ago toward the
end of August…
I wake up in the morning needing desperately to pee and roll
over to look out the window just a little too fast sensing my dreams
disappearing from my consciousness as I do so. The loss of them is so sudden
that is distinctly physical; I can almost see/hear them swooshing away never to
be recaptured again. I lie still for a few minutes but they are gone. Gone. Forever.
As dreams sometimes are. As my youngest son’s childhood soon will be.
Later this week he is going off to college. I will not see
him for six months.
He was cleaning out his room yesterday. He started by
organizing which clothes he was going to take with him to school and ended up
putting the rest into a variety of different piles; those to give to a younger
family friend, those to go to the local thrift shop, those to throw out, and,
having finished sorting his clothes, he started work on the stuff accumulated
on his shelves. He has been living in this room since he was 4, and, being a
bit of a pack rat, has many boxes of accumulated treasures. As I poked my head
in to check on him he was going through a box of saved paperwork; a once purple
but now faded ‘shoe’ made out of Bristol board and laced with yarn, a book of
words than end in ‘an’, a version of ‘The Princess and the Pea’ laboriously
hand written on primary paper, birthday cards made for him by his friends to
celebrate his turning six… some of these treasures were sorted into a to-keep
pile but many more, those whose significance was lost to time, were being tossed
into a large garbage bag. Next he looked at his collection of ribbons and
trophies collected through years of hockey and other sports. ‘No,’ I wanted to
say, ‘don’t throw any of it out, keep it all, forever’, but I didn’t say
anything because I knew what I really meant was, ‘No, don’t grow up, keep on
being a child, forever.’ He got the smallest bedroom just because he was the
youngest child but he still managed to fill it with personality. I see the full
garbage bags lined up outside his door, watch him crumpling and discarding a
once favourite poster of Jose Theodore, and know that when I walk into the room
next week it will be as impersonal as a hotel room. ‘Leave it all,’ I want to
ask, ‘I need a shrine to visit.’ But I know that would be silly. Instead I ask
if there is anything I can do to help and he says he’d like my input to sort
out the last few clothes and I almost trip over my feet in the rush to help him
I am so desperate to spend these last few minutes with him before he goes.
Seeing him organizing and discarding the accumulated effects
of so many years pulled at my heart strings in a way I hadn’t expected it to.
I have been looking forward to my children growing up and leaving home, I have
been a single parent for quarter of a century, I am ready to move on. And yet.
It was a good quarter of a century, I was, despite the hardship and loneliness
of being a single parent, thrilled to have kids, and happy to spend the years
nurturing them, which is why this final goodbye will be so bittersweet. I have
known for months that my youngest son would be leaving at the end of August but
nonetheless I find myself startled that it is actually happening. I suggest he
might like to stay an extra year and he does not realize I am only partially
joking. Yes, I will keep in contact with my kids, visit them and have them
visit me, I will, I hope, continue to listen to their troubles and triumphs,
act as a sounding board, perhaps even give them my two cents now and again. But
it will not be the same. I live in a small isolated town and it is unlikely
that they will ever boomerang back. They will be gone. For good. Oddly, it is
the little things I will miss as much as the big ones; for twenty five years I
have checked the fridge every morning to see how much milk there is, for twenty
five years I have been aware, at night, when my children go to sleep and when
they wake up, for twenty five years, just being there, in the same house as my
children, has been, in itself, a significant part of my self-definition. No
more.
When my first child left I hardly noticed him going, there
were still two at home and the noise and commotion carried on with almost equal
volume. When the second one left the occasional silences were almost deafening,
the house was often full of teenagers, as usual, but, sometimes, my youngest
would be elsewhere, and I almost didn’t know what to do with the unexpected
stretches of solitude. Now, now, now with the last child leaving – I cannot
imagine how different it will be. The phone, which rang almost incessantly for
decades with my children’s friends calling, will likely go into shock, the
front door, which has never been locked, and which is literally falling off its
hinges from overuse, will likely suffer withdrawl symptoms, even the vacuum
cleaner is likely to miss its so frequent passes. Me, I might simply disappear.
I loved being a parent of newborns, of babies, of toddlers,
of children, and of teens. I loved that clean-baby smell and the ever-so-soft
skin they had when they were very young and the way that merely rubbing your
nose on their belly resulted in endless laughter. I loved those days at the
beach when you would sit them in the sand near the water’s edge with a plastic
shovel in their hand and they would play for hours digging and splashing. I
loved trips to the playground, days when a walk around to yard sales with a
nickel each to spend would result in new toys and games that would keep them busy
for hours. I loved the years when I had a box of scrap wood on the back deck
and all the children in the neighbourhood accumulated to hammer and nail and
paint their ‘sculptures’. I loved canoeing and camping with the kids, downhill
and cross-country skiing, visiting friends and relatives, road trips across the
country, vacations to exotic destinations. I loved watching them grow - older,
taller, more independent. I loved it when they got jobs and saved up for new
computers, bought their own motor boats, joined the high school football team,
started to go off for long weekends alone with their friends. I loved it all,
even the teenage years when the front hall was full of dozens of pairs of shoes
and the basement a seething mass of hot bodies and pounding music or the
backyard the scene of beer-pong tournaments where laughter flowed freely till
the cops came by to shut it down…
I noticed, of course, the many firsts; the first time my
oldest walked downtown by himself, the first time my middle child rode his bike
around the block without training wheels, the first time the youngest drove by
himself into the city. But the lasts got lost somehow. When was the last time
one snuggled in my bed with me in the morning, or flung himself into my arms
for comfort, or sat on my lap for a story… Where did those go, those lasts? How
did I not notice them too?
Yes, I loved being a parent, and though I found the journey
with three children, always very different ages from each other, a significant
challenge, I have no regrets whatsoever about any of it. I calculated once that
I was responsible for over 27000 meals while the kids were growing up. Where
have those years gone? Did I enjoy them enough? Did I ever yearn for the day
when it would be over, when the youngest would be 18 and walking out the door,
when I would be, finally, free, of the responsibility? Did I? If so, shame on
me. Whether I did, or not, the end of my last child’s childhood is here, and,
like the boxes of souvenirs and mementos dumped into garbage bags as he was
cleaning out his room, those days when I was a mother with children at home will
soon be gone forever, impossible to recapture, to hold onto, to keep.
Still lying in bed contemplating both the past and the
future a small part of me regrets that I was not born 5000 years ago in a time
when children and grandchildren were almost certain to live forever alongside
you in the same cave or even 500 years ago when chances were they would farm
the land beside you but a larger part of me is glad to have been born now in
the day and age when this the whole world is our oyster - as least for those of
us fortunate enough to have the opportunity to travel – and so my dream is for
my kids to fly free, to see and do and experience, learn new things and meet
new people, climb mountains both real and imaginary, and then, of course,
to come home and tell me how wonderful it all is, how happy they are, and let
me bask in the stories of their successes. Looking out my window at the two
hundred year old pines standing implacably against the sky, I realize that my
dreams from last nights sleep might have fled my consciousness but my dreams
for the future are solid and secure. I know what I want; to keep in contact
with my sons, watch as their lives soar. It is every mother’s dream, perhaps,
to see one’s children thrive, likely has been so since the dawn of time, but
that does not in any way take away from it, if anything it simply validates it.
As I clamber slowly out of bed I realize that my children’s
childhoods might have come to an end, but their lives have not, and neither has
mine. A page has merely been turned. I smile as I pad past the small empty
bedroom on my way downstairs to the washroom. I can’t wait to see what happens
next.
