It’s Getting Quiet Around Here

As a woman with more than a career—I run an interactive marketing company—raising two children has been bit of a challenge, and I’ve loved (almost) every minute of it.  But lately, as things get prematurely quiet, I find myself projecting ahead to when they’re going to be even more silent.

The spring before my daughter, Rachel, went off to study at NYU Tisch in NYC, I was admittedly very anxious about her going off to school, and living in the city “alone.”  My nervousness seemed very out of portion to what was coming, and I assumed it was a wicked combination of the normal, first-child-off-to-college-my-world-is-going-to-change blues AND that my 4’11’ not-really-aware of her surroundings little love was going to be living in the city on her own.  It seemed just when she and I were getting along so well, she was heading off without me. 

For the weeks approaching her graduation, I went on quiet crying jags when no one else was around.  I thought I’d be blubbering at her graduation ceremony, but, strangely, on the drive to the ceremony, everything came flooding out in a monologue that gave Rachel and Wil some great material to cart out whenever a laugh is needed.  In a 5 minute straight rant, that started with sarcasm, ramped up to yelling, spurted out in a string of 4-letter epithets, and concluded in all us laughing as tears streamed down our faces, I let it all go.   From that point until I dropped Rachel off at NYU in August, not another tear was shed.

I cried a bit on the way home from New York, but that was to be expected….

The surprises started soon after that.

The child who had announced with believable bravado (she was an actress before a writer, after all) that she was not coming home until Thanksgiving, though I was welcome to visit her in the city if I wanted to see her, suddenly started showing up at the train station every weekend, homesick, sad, and having a really hard time adjusting to the city.  Not only did she stay all weekend, she came home during the week, too.

So the time I thought would be spent with my son, just mom and Wil, suddenly was being split, again, between the two of them.  And it wasn’t fun time.  There was a lot of angst in helping Rachel to be brave, get back on the train, and suck it up.

And then, in the midst of all of that, Wil suddenly had a girlfriend.

And the time with him that was already being taken up by his friends, now was stretching out and being consumed by time with his girlfriend too.

Don’t get me wrong.  I loved having Rachel around, though I did my best to keep her focused on staying in NYC and toughing it out so she could build a life and her own network of friends there.  And don’t get me wrong about Wil—I’m mature enough to know that he’s doing everything a now 17-year-old guy should be doing, and his friends and girlfriend are really wonderful—I love them all.

Well, the next surprise was that Wil decided to get a part-time job.  So my time with him has shrunken even more.  Down from 50% of the time due to shared custody in the divorce to 50% of that because of friends and girlfriend, and now another 50% of that gone because of his job a the local grocery store.

So, as I said, it’s getting kind of quiet around here.  And what everyone who had kids before me told me is absolutely true.  It all goes soooo fast. 

One minute they’re clinging to you and you are their whole world.  The next minute they venture off on their own and they circle back to you as home base.  And the next minute, they’re living the lives you prepped them for all along—all the sacrifice, all the lessons, all the examples, all the love—and, well, it’s suddenly kind of quiet.