Empty Nest – There Is A Time

Look. Think. Love.

We are family. We are devotion. We are love. We are humanity.

“The things that we love tell us what we are.”– Thomas Aquinas

Here We Are

Photo credit: dragonflyshots.com

Look at us. Here we are.

Look. Then, please think. Don’t say.

I am reluctant to show you who we are. Yet, I must.

I read comments and words everywhere that are so hurtful. The words on the screen, and on the page, make me want to run away.

Some days that I wonder how I am supposed to live. Me, and I’m not the one in danger, I can’t seem to breathe sometimes.

You make me so scared.

You can’t mean what you say. Do you?

If you thought, felt and knew her you wouldn’t say anything.

If you could be in my head for one minute and sense the love and care I have for her then you would be silent.

You would think. You would try to begin to understand.

I loved a child for nineteen years but maybe that child didn’t even exist. That child is gone or never was. Gender has to mean nothing to me, yet it means everything to her.

I have two daughters.

Can you be quiet and think about that?

Think about personhood. Think about the quality of life of an individual and how much that matters to you. You are a person, aren’t you?

Think about her, my youngest daughter. She is equal. She is beautiful.

Think about family.

Can you think about us living, playing, eating and sleeping under the same roof for years and years? Can you think about the intimacy of us?

Yet, within that closeness there was an omission of truth. There was a simple and authentic truth about one of us that was somehow ignored. Yet we loved and still love.

If you could imagine this, then you’d know how beautiful this special loyalty we have to each other is. You would make no noise or disturbance. You would refrain from hurting us.

Please don’t make me run away. Don’t frighten me.

Don’t hate us. Love us all, or go away discreetly.

Mostly, consider her, beyond me. Please don’t make her afraid or anxious. Make little noise or disturbance for her. She is easily broken and vulnerable.

Maybe her power will grow and her strength will rise if you can just think and not say.

You can hold us up with your silence or cut all of us down with your words.

Please consider the possibilities.

Look at this. Here we are.

We are family. We are devotion. We are love. We are humanity.

Opening the Gift

Life is 10% what you make it and 90% how you take it – Irving Berlin

Life is a gift that can sometimes be too abstract to fully understand.

I am grateful for it, regardless.

I will keep unwrapping it. Gratitude is all I have for the Giver. A gift of an undeserving reward is mine. Through sorrow, pain, and confusion, the gift is there for me. I know.

Reality Shift

When reality shifts, what then?

I wrote this as my path was shifting late in 2014. 2015 has been a true reality shift.

When reality shifts, what then?

It is as if you are watching a play and suddenly the curtain moves or the stage floor rotates.

There in your sight, before you, is a completely new set and circumstances. A new act is beginning. You understand that.

Yet, it takes a minute or two to wrap your brain around this newness. A new set and new characters are revealed. This time, in particular, this newness is surprising.

The play is truly veering in directions that need a new template to be set to understand. A novel organization of standards needs to be established.

More than a paradigm shift, the new act of this play is asking for you to understand it as a progression, as a more optimum view. This view is one that is not only new but better. This is a more real reality.

And the actors want you to come on stage!

That takes a revolutionary mind and will. Do I have these?

footnote:

I am trying to get out of my seat.

Heartstrings are real.

from Emily Ann Studio If only we could all tie together like this! How beautiful it would be. I learned about heartstrings in this time. — from Emily Ann Studio
If only we could all tie together like this! How beautiful it would be. I learned about heartstrings during this time.

I’ve heard about heartstrings. I’ve probably sung about them. I don’t think I quite understood them until today.

Heartstrings tie us to others.

They are real.

I felt mine today.

Being human is being connected to others. It is love, sacrifice, and the absolute forfeiture of us that brings about “we”. It is in the depletion of self that we allow ourselves to be connected.

It is in this that we can equate with others.

A mother is so privileged. She knows how to do this.

At the end of this time that I’ve chosen to write, I choose to not write about the pain, the loss, or the closure that I’ve reached. I am choosing to write about the benefit and the liberty that is revealed to me in this moment.

I read about another mother today who wrote about how this final chapter in raising her children is like closing a door. It can be that. And I guess in many ways it is.

It is really the end.

The end of days and nights of mothering, it is. But it is not the end of being a mother.

As long as they are alive, we will be their mothers. My mother is mine and will always be so, as long as I live.

I am theirs. No chapter closing will end that. Only fate and destiny control that portal’s closure.

I felt the strings pulling me back as I drove home from Boston today. I felt the heartstrings straining, and the car moved forward. The ache in my chest was almost unbearable.

I love them. I am connected.

Yet, I am linked but not attached. I wrote about this perforated attachment when my oldest daughter was a baby. I always knew this day would come.

I don’t want to be melancholy. This is really a good day. It is a moment in time worth cherishing.

Both of my adult children are beginning anew. I am just a mere four hours away by car.

Yet, I’m not really the main character in the sequel to this story. The characters are represented as blocks of color that will be filled in as the story unfolds.

I am grateful. I have learned from love in ways that my younger self couldn’t have imagined.

I remember listening to love songs as a teenager and thinking how wonderful it would be to love someone. I never knew that love would give me more, teach me more, and guide me more than I could ever conceive.

Love is really all there is. Love is an open book, not a closed one.

At this moment, I am humbly appreciative.

I am forever held together with the fabric of a heartstring. I am perpetually thankful and incessantly grateful.

Heartstrings exist. They fasten us to others.

Unity is wonderful. It is strong. That is why heartstrings will never break, and it does not matter how far they are pulled apart.

That is what I have learned. There is a time to be filled with gratitude. That is what this time is.

Turning A Corneri

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“Don’t look back, you’re not going that way!”-

If only I’d known how many turns she’d take!- 7/2015

Are We Turning the Corner?

Yesterday, truly, I felt paused and in an anxious halt. My child didn’t want to talk about what is to come. They seemed paralyzed in the moment. I felt frustrated and confused.

Tonight, we did the laundry together. It wasn’t awful. It was pleasant.

This child knows how to fold clothes better than I do!

I saw faint hints of a smile today that weren’t there yesterday. They may be turning the corner.

Are we both?

I think so.

There have been so many milestones and corners turned over the years. However, this one is like turning the corner in a foreign city. The streets are strange, awkward and uncharted. It is uneasy moving forward and almost too frightening to turn the corner.

Maybe that is what we’ve been feeling all week.

But I suppose the streets are less dark today than yesterday. They seem safe enough to turn the wheel, at least a bit.

I know there are so many people who are turning corners more frightening than ours and that it seems silly to be so distressed about something as simple as an offspring going to college. But I, the mother, want my child to move onward with risk abandoned and with resoluteness and purpose.

The grin beamed of progress.

The corner is just ahead waiting to be turned. I’ll see you all around the bend and I’ll let you know how it is when we get to the other side.

See What Happens

Trust, when the colors fall on the page they will look like a feeling.

“Be brave enough to live life creatively, the creative place where no one has ever been.” -Alan Alda

If I’d only known that she’d have to go on to live life not only creatively but authentically. She must be braver than anyone I’ve ever known!- 7/2015

This child was always one to take the lead and see what happened later. We couldn’t keep up with them when they were a toddler. Swirling around, causing commotion, a whirlwind of activity, they were that for sure. Swift, impulsive, and almost dizzying, as a mother, this little one tired me!

When they were in the fifth grade, this child splattered paint on the page. They wrote an artist statement expressing that they did this because they wanted to see what happened when they randomly threw paint down on paper. They concluded in a paragraph explaining that the painting turned out to look like the great feeling they get when they ride on a roller coaster.

How do colors on a page look like a feeling? Fifth graders know about those things. Fifth graders with the wonder of my child most certainly know.

I think maybe I’ve forgotten what a feeling looks like on a page. Maybe I haven’t forgotten. However, I don’t want my child to forget how to do this!

This child leaves this weekend.

They are no longer familiar with splattering paint. High school asked for more assembly, less creativity. Late nights, long days, and tiring assignments needed organization that nearly broke their spirit!

Still, this one is one of the most original and creative people I know. This is being said objectively, I assure you.

They were voted most artistic and received an unexpected superlative in their high school yearbook. I know they may have forgotten that they are creative. The superlative reminded them and me. Oh, yes, that’s right!

This beautiful person is an artist, for sure, but not in the way you are thinking. They do not color with paint but with notes, sounds, rhythms, and breaths. Still, they can really splatter color! I can’t wait to see what happens!

Am I ready to let them go? No, definitely not. Not this expressive, imaginative, ingenious creature, I can’t be prepared to release this one. They are visionary. True, sincere, naïve, and too honest, yet surreal, and they cannot be ordinary.

Someone who wants to see what happens doesn’t really know what is happening. I am scared for them.

I know I have to see what happens. If you know me, help me trust that when the colors fall on the page, they will evoke the same feeling as riding a roller coaster, and that the colors are beautiful, safe, and pretty.

Thanks.

Joy

Update: Joy, this has followed this daughter from the start of her life apart from me. As her mother, I am still being fed with her dreams. 7/2015

There is joy in a morning, any morning. It is the start of a new day. The beginning of something, maybe something magnificent and unexpected.

There is joy in this day.

I remember a day, a beautiful summer day, when she was sitting in her “clip-on” high chair. The chair was clipped to a picnic table (I’m not even sure if they still make these, as they are probably no longer considered safe). We were having a picnic at the park. We shared sandwiches and fruit with each other. She giggled and laughed. I smiled and sighed. Birds sang. Bees buzzed. Sun shined.

That joyful summer day was a historic moment when I knew there was truly bliss in motherhood. If I had a Facebook page at that time, a photo would have been posted with the caption, “This is the triumph of motherhood”.

Joy, delight, and gladness are what we really hope for. Delight is what we remember. It is what we want.

There is such happiness in this moment. This morning marks the sunrise of newness. The onset of a start.

My daughter is feeding me with her dreams, and I am feeding her with my hope.

There is joy in the morning. This moment is the triumph of motherhood.

Clothes

I don’t think that I’m alone in this. Parting with clothes is not easy to do for me. Obviously neither is it a manageable task for my oldest daughter!

I don’t like to separate from the time that something fit me, looked fine on me or furnished me with convenience or fashion. I don’t like to say good-bye, even to clothes. I think you are getting the idea, after all I’m blogging about this “good bye” topic after all!

This daughter leaves on Thursday and we still haven’t packed a single garment. More importantly we haven’t recycled or discarded one garment either!

Thinking of this in a dream last night (yes, I dreamed about clothes) I did realize that her lime green bathing suit and gaudy striped sun dress from childhood are gone. They’ve disappeared, so I guess we were able to let go. This is a good aspiration, as I means that clothes have actually moved out of this house!

When the clothes are gone then time has actually moved forward. If no one will wear them in the absence of a mannequin, they are just occupying space.

Here we are at time and space again!

Clothes are great reminders of moments in time.

When my mother died and I had to clean out her closets. It was the clothes (and the jewelry) that brought me back to being with her. These things allowed me to be in her presence. I’ve kept some pins, necklaces and even sweaters (that don’t really fit me) so that I can be with her again.

I think I’ll keep something. Maybe my daughter’s prom dress to remind me of the day we went to get her make-up done at the counter at a local department store and I realized she really is a woman. Maybe her first coaching shirt to remind me of the day I saw her strength and bossiness as a gift and not a problem! Maybe I’ll keep a tailored blouse to remind me that she isn’t really very different than me and that sometimes looking the “part” is what we all do, despite our objection to being comparable to others.

Either way, clothes will be packed, rejected and reclaimed this week. Clothes that oddly enough will remain in my dreams.

Daily Prompt: A to Zo

I tried this. Here it is.

Mother

A mother sits on the cusp on something different. Beginning something new to her, yet familiar to so many others. Counting the days, hours, and moments till quiet replaces footsteps. Dreaming of what she wishes for them and wondering what she might remember about them. Encouraged by her optimism, yet tentative in her hopefulness. Finding herself and losing herself simultaneously, she is. Growing is happening in the magnitude of this time. Happy for them and content, she remains heavy with regrets of inadequacy. In this measured period, she is holding back and holding on. Just in time to free them, she fears she might be too guarded. Kept near her heart they will always remain. Love is the bond, the sustenance and the ideal. Movement forward is the direction, fueled by this warmth, for them and for her. No one can really halt this scattering. Only to take flight is what they desire and only to watch them go is what she knows is right. Positioning herself to view the exit, she is almost ready. Quite a time in her life this is. Remembering all the days she wished they would leave her alone, she has reached a time when they will. Sadness nears her but does not possess her. Time is a friend and it has been good. Unbelievable, difficult, and unpredictable, but good, time has been. Veering, turning, weaving to a new course, time will teach her new lessons. What will she learn? X marks an eternal spot in her heart; yet these children exit, slowly. Yearning for a glimpse into the future, she decides to just close her eyes. Zigzagging through the door, they will go and she will stay firmly in one place, until she changes bearings and moves on.

Daily Prompt: A to Z (jemmbarr.wordpress.com)

There Are Places “I” Remember

“The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing.”
– Pierre Bonnard

Memories for me are very visual. I am a visual learner and thinker. I think in images and pictures. My children are both listeners. I’m certain their memories are in the form of music, voices and sound. My mind conjures up a collage of visions and I think their minds must resonate with quite a din.

That being said, there are places that I do remember. Places that have been etched in my mind.

As I think about my children, they are youthful and smiling. We know well this was not the case; especially in the case of my oldest daughter! But I am avoiding the other images for now.

I remember places, sun shining, wind blowing, trees swaying, birds flying, clouds moving; places where my children walked, ran, moved, swam and danced.

Now these places are snapshots in my memories. The visions are actually more like a video than a portrait. I do see them moving; I really do!

I’ve chosen a visual gift for my departing daughter. Four photos that I have had framed will be given to her for the walls of her small apartment at graduate school. They are the photos included here in this post.

One, of the gazebo in our hometown, to capture the innocent vision I have of her skipping to the library, right past the gazebo, with a book in hand, as I pushed the stroller behind her with her younger sibling singing to the birds and humming to the beat of the stroller wheels, as they rolled over the humps in the sidewalk. One, of the view from our favorite spot in Maine, to forever paint a portrait of her trying to balance on the rocks and keep up with our youngest and then deciding she might just head back to the car, far away from the seagulls that were swooping overhead. One, of trees in the Pocono landscape, to shade in almost a mirage of people, pets and pizzas that have shifted through this place, while she laughed and giggled. One, of the Cloisters at her beloved college, to expose the moment when in a damp, white dress, on a rainy graduation day, she popped a bottle of champagne and toasted to tomorrow and said good-bye to her childhood.

I think in pictures. I am gifting visions. I hope that they create conversations, while evoking memories, that remove covers and open up chances to reminisce. I hope they create a racket of chatter. May the sounds of her past be heard in and through this facade.

Another hope from this mom at this time.

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