Countdown to Launch, With Bookends
A Throwback Post
I first published this on my blog eight years ago. That innocent time before Covid, before AI, before adulthood claimed both my children.
Looking back, that summer does seem like a time of innocence, though I’m wise enough to know that memory can paint even the harshest of present realities with a rose-colored tint.
I made a few minor edits for clarity and so as to not lead you astray (e.g., removing a reference to my long-dormant Twitter account). Enjoy—and please share your stories of memorable transitions and how you planned for and/or coped with them.
Finally, commemorating the publication of my book of short stories eight years ago brings one fact into stark relief:
It’s high time for me to publish another book. I’m working on it!
Originally published July 6, 2018
Tiny Shoes Dancing officially launches on August 8.
But this post is about the countdown to an altogether different launch happening less than a week after the book launch: dropping Son #2 off at college.
The second countdown brings to mind the anticipation I felt during pregnancy, looking ahead to the day my child would be born. I feel the same sense of approaching a dividing line between before and after, with the after being irrevocably and unknowably different from the before.
I’ve always been a pretty laissez-faire parent, so I’m not making many demands during what I’m thinking of as the final summer of my son’s childhood. At my son’s age, I was all too eager to join the world of adults, to get a job, to prove myself capable of self-sufficiency.
Now I wish I hadn’t been in such a rush.
Get out the hanky before you watch this six-minute film if you have any experience sending adult children out into the world.
I’m painfully aware of the momentousness of the approaching launch. And I am coping as I often do, by plowing deeper into work. It’s no accident that I have a book launch and a boy launch within days of one another.
This year of my life shoulders up against its twin bookends.
In January there was the date of birth of my first son and this summer, the departure date of my second.
(I wonder, even as I summon the image of bookends, how many generations it will be before physical books disappear entirely and the objects intended to hold them in place become merely symbolic.)
These days our house is full of awkward glances and deflective shrugs. As the family vessel for emotion, it’s my job to hold a space for the feelings others might rather avoid. So I set up my summer to focus on the dreams that come, to imagine a future in which my children inhabit worlds that are opaque to me, and to honor memories that bubble to the surface.
I remember the first time I left my older son when he was only a few days old.
He was born during an El Niño winter and I felt as if it had been raining non-stop for weeks. When the rain let up for a few hours, I wanted to get out of the house. I drove to the local library, just down the street. As I drove away, I felt an overwhelming sensation of emptiness, both inside my body and around me in the car. He’s not here, my senses screamed, this tiny human who was part of me for nine months and then literally attached to me since birth. The awareness took my breath away.
Five years later, my younger son accompanied us to drop his older brother at the first day of kindergarten. He wore a tiny backpack and a three-year-old-sized button-down shirt. I’ll never forget the look of betrayed disappointment he fired at us when we took his hand and led him home, informing him that he couldn’t stay to attend kindergarten.
I don’t expect his college drop-off to leave me quite as physically stunned as the first separation from my older son. And this time, my younger son will get to stay.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
The more things change, the more they are the same. I don’t believe it. All is mutable. A few weeks from now, I’ll be on the other side of the dividing line.
I’ve set things up to ease into the changed state that awaits on the other side of that line. The day we say goodbye to Son #2 marks the start of my cross-country independent bookstore tour. Follow my author page on Facebook for news from my stops along the way.
You are so on it, Audrey: “All is mutable.” As for milestones, a lot of mine came unscheduled, without a milestone. Retirement, for example, was a slow coasting until the career just stopped, overwhelmed by something greater. Creative writing had arrived, its inner light shining brighter each day. Interesting how we’re all different, isn’t it?
There have been several of those milestones. I think the hardest one was waiting for my bar results in '92, right after getting my J.D. and taking the bar two months later. I counted down to the moment with dread. When it came, I went to 7-11 and got a bottle of beer in a paper sack to either celebrate passing or the unthinkable alternative.