From Sheer Panic to...Weird?

What a difference four years can make.

I have told this story before, so please bear with me if you’ve heard it before. I am at the age where I often say things like, “I know I’ve told you this, bear with me.” I suppose that this will get worse. Bear with me.

Four years ago, my eldest had just graduated high school and I was a mess. M-E-S-S.

I was:

☑️ in my earliest months of sobriety

☑️ crawling out of covid with everyone else

☑️ in the midst of watching a friendship fall apart

☑️ trying to help my youngest find her footing with her mental health and education

☑️ coming out of two biopsies and a lumpectomy on my right breast, awaiting results

☑️ trying to come to terms with the shooting at my eldest daughter’s school, which shut down her last weeks of class, and threatened to change prom, graduation, everything.

☑️ over 40 pounds heavier; knees aching and feeling awful.

☑️ supposed to move my daughter to one of the biggest cities in the world and leave her there?

When I left her, standing on the corner of Columbus Ave. and 60th street in NYC, she looked so small. So young. So little. I was so (and I don’t use this word lightly) traumatized from the five months before, the idea of leaving my first born in that wild city made me absolutely panic. My body felt the same as if I was leaving my newborn, all alone, on a city corner. I was almost hyperventilating when my husband lead me away; I know people were alarmed seeing me and, in NYC, that is saying something. I wept so hard in the car, my eyes swelled shut for days. I didn’t sleep that night, instead, I watched my daughter’s moving blue dot on find my phone. She went to a club downtown, didn’t come back to her dorm until 3 am, and I stayed awake the whole time until I saw the blue dot arrive safely in her dorm.

I joked about this story to people as I was living it, but I had temporarily lost my mind.

I didn’t understand, then, that my panic and grief was deeply related to the previous five months, as well as covid, serious work burn-out, and dealing with my emotions without anything to dull them (wine).

I just thought I couldn’t handle my eldest child leaving.

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Now, she has just graduated from college, and I didn’t shed a tear. It just feels…weird. What a crappy word that is, “weird”…it doesn’t describe the complexity of anything, but the graduation feels like that. Weird. Didn’t I just graduate from college? Time is getting increasingly slippery, and I just don’t understand how my daughter graduated from the same school where I had just left her. If time had stopped moving during covid, it sure went to lightening speed when the country re-opened and, now, I just feel confused. So, like, she’s just an adult up there, in that big city? Taking the LSATS and thinking about law school? Working in a coffee shop? Dog-sitting for Fordham faculty? Doing her laundry? Cleaning the toilet? Hanging with friends? Okay…cool, cool, cool.

I am telling you all this to say is that distance and time and therapy and sobriety makes looking the rearview mirror a helluva lot clearer. I was so embarrassed of how panicked I was when I left her at school; now I have compassion for that Meghan. She was doing her best to scrape through, and she did. She made it.

We are all growing up. Practice makes progress.

love you.