My Kids Will Go and I Protest This

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I’ve been feeling extra blue lately, and I’m finally willing to admit there’s something to it. Like all denial, I figured it’d just go away if I never let the truth see the light of day. It’s almost humorous that we do this, even though it feels the farthest thing from funny.

The cause was obvious to me several times, but I simply took my observations, shoved them in a bottle, winged that thing across the wide river of my daily ruminations, and walked away. This left me bummed out and sad, but I figured that was better than looking reality in the face. Did I think it wasn’t going to catch up with me?

Absolutely!

Thankfully it did catch up, and I thank my husband for that. He nudged me into admitting that the fact that our youngest kid will be graduating from college soon is tanking me.

This sadness that I shove in the bottle and hurl out of sight is about my empty nest. I feel sorrow flood my capillaries when I imagine it. I freeze, squeeze my eyes shut, and wait until the hideous shadow passes me by. It doesn’t walk off. It only turns around and floats back, hovering above, and I’d loathe it if I wasn’t so scared of it.

I’m sure I sound overboard, and I know this is all part of life, and life so far has been very good to me, minus the tricky parts. But if I were totally open with you and invited you into my heart at the moments when I look at my son’s last college semester, you’d see how sad I really am.

I wouldn’t admit this in public — I’d hide it like a terrible scar — if it weren’t for Eddie Murphy. Yes, Eddie Murphy the comedian.

Thanks, Eddie

My son goes to school two hours from our home and came back for a surprise weekend visit recently. After he left to go back to school, my husband and I watched Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. It’s an interview-type show where Jerry Seinfeld picks up a famous comedian in some splashy, cool car, and they drive to a coffee shop for coffee and comedian shoptalk.

That show singlehandedly kept our spirits up during the first half of 2020, so it stood to reason we’d put it on after our son left to go back to school the other day. I love the serendipities of life, especially when they come from Eddie Murphy.

Toward the end of the first episode of Season 11, Jerry asks Eddie about his kids. Eddie explains the older ones have grown and left the house.

“When they move out, it’s different,” Murphy says. “Oh, yeah?” Jerry asks. “Yeah, it’s one thing when [as teenagers] they go and socialize, and they always come back to you. [But] when they move out for real, you just cry like — oh, you cry like an old grandmother. When they leave, you go in the room and fall apart.”

That struck me. Even Eddie Murphy, this extraordinarily talented risk-taking comedian, caved in the face of an empty nest. Why did I think he’d be any different than me? Why did I think I’d be immune to the sadness and be able to walk away from it as if it wasn’t real?

Maybe one useful thing to keep in mind is how lucky I am to have this sorrow to begin with.

Eggs, nests, thorns

I put all my eggs in the mom basket. I forwent an extensive career for working part-time and being there when my kids got home from school, and only then, working once they had reached school age. Being a mom was my focus and passion — and identity.

As my sons have grown older, the future hole from my sons’ eventual absence has been in the back of my mind, but this January the recognition that it’s essentially here has made it a cruel thorn.

What I know about these tough journeys down the path of loss is that it’s a multi-faceted coming to terms. Loss has many faces which will be displayed at various times as you progress through it.

Loss is a hole. It’s a shift in identity. It’s a rude awakening. It’s an earthquake of self. It’s confusion. It’s melancholy, replaying, and wishing. It’s a fierce battle. It’s a refusal. And, finally, it’s acceptance.

Ultimately — eventually — it’s a birth.

The experienced

I look at the other parents who I call ‘upperclassmen’. They’re a bit further along than me and have made it to the next destination unscathed and, even more amazing, invested. Watching and listening to upperclassmen has been a strategy of mine for many years. They will always prove to me how doable the worrisome stuff is.

This is important because folks will come and go in our lives all the time. These aren’t peripheral people. These are our families and friends. They move away. The fledge. They die one day. We die, too. Knowing others have weathered these life challenges— like Eddie Murphy — can help us get through them, too. If they were able to take the first step into the next phase, so can we. And soon we’ve accepted the truth: this is all part of the human story.

Today I’d like to protest that silly truth but call me tomorrow. I probably will have accepted the first piece of it, and I’ll tell you all about it. I predict it will be just fine.

Hope you're well, friends.