A few months ago, my son, Sam, was home in Houston for a very abbreviated spring break, and we were out having lunch in between his incoming and outgoing text messages. Suddenly he looked at his phone and blanched. Before I had a chance to ask what was wrong, he typed a response, a new message beeped, and he clutched his heart and fell back in his chair with relief. Beaming, he turned his phone toward me. I squinted at a photo of something that looked like a wedding announcement, on cream-colored paper with fancy italics. “I’m done!” Sam prompted when I took too long to understand.
It was the invitation to his college graduation. When one of his roommates had texted to say that three invitations had come to their apartment, Sam, whose college experience has sometimes resembled an HBO end-of-season cliffhanger, had demanded proof that his name was actually on one of them.
And there it was. As I studied the invite, something warm and wet pressed at the back of my eyes, and my throat closed. The mortarboard and the diploma would come soon enough, as we became live figures in one of those Kodak moments that never seem quite real for being so universal. But I knew just then, amid bites of our not-so-fancy La Madeleine salades, that another chapter of our lives had come to an end.
When Sam, who is my only child, went away to college in New York, in 2009, I adapted fairly quickly to the rhythm of his comings and goings: the anticipation of his arrival (Clear the calendar! Stock the fridge!); the heady rush to the airport to pick him up; the luxurious days that stretched ahead of my husband, John, and me once we had our son back again; then slowly, insidiously, the advance mourning that preceded his inevitable departure; and finally the bleak return trip to the airport, followed by the few months’ wait before the cycle started again. Spring break, summer break, Thanksgiving break, Christmas break—in years past, when Sam was still living at home, we’d given in to this enforced downtime with a mixture of angst (“These kids are never in school—how am I supposed to get any work done?”) and gratitude (one of my most treasured photos remains a shot of Sam at fifteen asleep on a train during a family trip to Scotland). But once Sam went away to college, our time together always seemed to have a clock ticking in the background, a reminder of the day when our schedules would no longer mesh so easily, if at all.
By his second year at college, all the back and forth between Houston and New York had begun to remind me of the long-distance love affairs I’d had during school and for years after—his visits had the same roller-coaster feel, the same hits of pure joy and nearly inconsolable sorrow. But in my twenties, I’d had the luxury of creating my own agony, ginning up drama pretty much for the hell of it. The substance of my life was, after all, pretty insubstantial. Now that I’m older, my interest in generating excess anguish has gone the way of cravings for fragile foreign cars and four-inch platforms. Having experienced real pain—the loss of a parent, the serious illnesses of friends, the occasional failures of the body that portend more to come—I’ve learned not to borrow trouble. Still, what I can’t ignore about this stage of my life as a parent is that letting go does not get easier. It gets harder.
Like so much of life, this realization, as clichéd as they come, caught me by surprise. Months before Sam left for college, I read up on empty-nest syndrome in the same way I had studied pregnancy nearly two decades before, with close to the same outcome, which was terror. But this time, instead of receiving warnings about placenta previa and postpartum depression in What to Expect When You’re Expecting, I was cautioned about extreme grief from websites that intoned, “Parents may find themselves spending hours in their children’s rooms instead of engaging in normal, everyday activities.... It may seem that there’s nothing left to do in life and they’ve served their purpose.” What to do? Some sites suggested creating a “letting-go ritual.” A despondent parent might “sail a lantern with a candle in it down a stream,” “plant a tree,” or “bronze something special of your child’s.”
That’s not what I experienced, though—at least initially. For almost twenty years I had been shaving an hour here to gain an hour there to be a room mother or Halloween carnival assistant or homework helper or carpool driver or just to serve a facsimile of dinner before bath and bedtime. I don’t regret a minute of it—all those mundane activities made for a day-to-day closeness that helped Sam and me negotiate the horror of adolescence and the hell that was the college application process. But this also meant that my time was never entirely my own. A few weeks into Sam’s first semester away, I dropped in on a friend in the middle of the afternoon. It was a crystalline day with just a hint of fall in the air; she’d opened all her windows to let in what was probably the first cool breeze of the season. We drank coffee, gossiped, and sprawled on the sofa like teenage girls while the shadows lengthened and the sky yellowed, then faded to a deep, velvety blue. I had no place to be, nothing to do. In the space of that afternoon, I felt something that had been wound very tight give way, and there I was, the person I used to be. “Welcome back,” I thought. “Welcome back.”
Since then, I’ve lived one life when Sam is home and another when he isn’t. When he’s in New York, I probably work too much and exercise with a passion matched only by its futility. Sam is never far