I Am Back

I am here, though I feel a little less myself without the kids here. So maybe a version of myself is back. A slightly different version than the person I am when they’re home.

While I was away, a person liked a comment I made on a friend’s Substack many years ago, so it sent me a notification. I left it about a year before the twins left for college, about the college drop off:

I don’t see myself being nearly as okay with the moment. We’re a year away. I cry now. I think about it now. I sense that it will intensify when we actually reach the moment. I don’t know how I’ll step back into the car, even though I also rationally know that I will need to do it. I need to know how to let that rational side of my brain (I prepared them, they’re ready for this, it will be good for them) can be louder than the emotional side of my brain.

Side note: I never learned how to let that rational side of my brain be louder than the emotional side of my brain.

It is still impossibly hard. I feel something ripping inside of me when we drive away, and it comes with physical pain. It’s so strange; I can stand there and calmly say goodbye to them, thinking I’ll be okay this time. And then the moment the actual separation begins, when they walk away from the car and I am alone with Josh, it feels like something internally explodes, rips… I lack the perfect term to describe how it feels. Just that it is physically and emotionally painful.

I was talking to Mali after she left a comment on one of the blog posts I re-posted while away. I don’t see the grief — even the pre-grief — as necessarily a bad thing. I don’t want to cry earlier than necessary or worry constantly, and I certainly don’t want to feel the explosion of physical and emotional pain when I separate from them.

While I can never know about joys that I missed out on (in the same way that I can never know any of the things that didn’t happen), I would guess that I ended up having more joy due to the anticipation. It made me mindful of grabbing the moment. Of doing things together. Of being present. It made me volunteer for things so I could be involved. It made me come up with projects we could do together, such as volunteering with animals. And they acknowledge and appreciate their childhood and can see from friends how lots of parents are otherwise. So it was mostly a good thing even if the anticipation made me sad.

That’s what the separation pain is — an inverse of the joy felt by being with them.

So I am back. In a way.