My Son is Suddenly 15-- Now I Miss Everything

I have come to the library because I want to be around people. (Am I desperate to be around people? Can I not stand to be alone? I’m not sure). But, I am– after a few years of joint custody and the subsequent toggling between Parenting and Not Parenting, and the era before that of sneaking time to myself– missing mothering, or at least family, immensely. 

My partner lives a two hour drive away. My son has three more years of high school. My little house feels ludicrously small, boring, empty. And I’m romanticizing the home I left, very freely and gladly, when I got divorced four years ago; a house big enough for dinner parties and even smallish house concerts, a house so spacious it was a bed and breakfast, too.

So, I’m at the library, and a child is losing his mind and melting down, wanting something his (very calm) mother won’t let him have. It sounds like nap time is needed or was missed, or it’s just the moon, or something like that. And I’m loving it. Of course, I’m off the hook; I don’t have to do anything about any of it. Or about the other two little ones who are looking for their mother (who is out running an errand) while their rather young babysitter twirls her hair and does her best to keep them away from the exit. 

I did not grow up loving babies. I never held them, and if I did, they tended to wake up and cry. I thought, once I had my own, that I understood and would always want to hold them, but it turned out I never craved their contact the way I did any adorable dog. (I would hold someone’s baby, because I remembered needing a break, needing bodily autonomy from the being I loved most in the world, but it was not like some women I’ve seen who light up, whose arms reach out before they are even aware they’re doing it). I grew up with a Working Mom, with an Artist Mom, with a Single Mom, and a globe-trotting-for-work-Dad. Career and productivity and brains and being creative were what was valued. Yes, we went to the farm for Christmas, despite “political differences,” because that’s what family does. And, yes, I loved having cousins across the road, grandparents nearby, and a strong sense of my family tree. But never did I realize before how family seems to be the thing I want most in the world, despite many other, much more attainable goals.

There were signs. I fell in love with a boyfriend’s family early on. I talked so glowingly to my own mother once about his mom and dad, the fridge so clean and the cupboards full of snacks, the pleasantly musty lake cabin Up North, the tidy old RV we took to a bluegrass festival, the matching towels in the bathroom, the anxious but cuddly chocolate lab… that she said, “That sounds really nice for you,” or something like that. Something like, Sounds like you have the family you’ve always wanted, in the shape and size and culture you didn’t have with us. Anyway, I felt guilty for telling her. And still stubbornly thankful for how I’d grown up: the free-ranging on the farm, the pragmatic encouragement to make a career in the arts, the fact that my mother did interesting things out in the world rather than being a homemaker. But I also subscribed to Martha Stewart Living when I was in high school; I felt soothed by the cleanness of lines and space, the way everything complimented everything else, the hydrangeas and even the rather silly matching dogs. The pale throw rugs and pitchers of flowers, and the clean, clear countertops.

It’s not a stretch to see how I recreated some of that at the bed and breakfast, smoothing over a rather chaotic marriage underneath. Even in my small house, I enjoyed the challenge of making order, of finding a way to create a beautiful space. But lately I hate to be there. At some point in the last year or two I noticed no desire to invite anyone over, indeed, almost a repulsion: too small, too small! Though I’d hosted brunch for eight, packed in, not so long before, and felt the space crowded with friendship and laughter. 

Did it break in a bigger way, this dream, when I took my ex-husband to court a year ago? (Loose financial ends, and verbal agreements that continued to disintegrate). Did the change come when I, finally, no longer owned the house that he lives in? Was it the strain of a longer-distance-than-I’d-like relationship? Or is it all just this: my son is fifteen. (Fifteen-and-a-half, if we’re still doing halves, the letting go of which feels like the shift from counting by months to counting by years: all of it matters! So much change happens in a day!). He’s solidly in high school. He’s worked a job he loves and wants to do again, maybe even for a career. He’s making plans to buy a snowmobile, and by midwinter he’ll have a car to go with his driver’s license. He bikes home in the dark after supper at a friend’s place, after a movie with his girlfriend, and I am at the house, or at the Y, or somewhere else in an effort to have something to do while I wait for him, bored, bored, bored.

It’s not his job to entertain me, of course, just like it wasn’t his job to be anything but himself all through his younger years. But, my god, I miss the bedtime stories and snuggles (which outlasted most of my peers and their children); I miss the “Hey, Mama… hey, Mama…” that I know sometimes tugged at me in a way that made me want to lie down and take a nap. Worse, I am now facing the opportunity to dive decadently into regret of every moment I didn’t spend with him, every hour or evening I snuck away. (The walk I took once when he was napping– and returned to find him searching for me, never mind I was stressed and depressed and trying not to lose my mind after a number of life-work-home transitions. Or, how, as I was getting divorced, I said yes to so many sleepovers away so that I could spend more time with the guy I thought was the final piece of a beautiful future.)

My son is fine. I daresay he’s great, actually. Literally, nearly everyday someone I bump into says how amazing he is: how kind, how considerate, how sweet, how positive, how talented. And I agree! I agree! But he’s hanging out with other teenagers, mostly, and not with me! I want to spend hours with this cool kid. I want to live a life in which I don’t split him between two homes, in which I see him every night– or, heaven help me that this is now the fantasy– that I and his father talk late into the evening about how much we both want more time with him, reminiscing about the little kid who overnight has transformed into a sort of man.

I visited a friend last week. She has twins who are only a bit older than my son. When one was gone for a month at summer camp, the other finally said, “Mom, stop trying to hang out with me!” And this is a nice kid, an affectionate kid. These kids asked to hug me when I said goodbye. So I think I’m finally seeing it’s not personal, it’s not specific to me; but god is it a shock nonetheless. All these years I encouraged and supported my son in being independent, in being at home in the world. And he is! He is happily out in it! And he doesn’t particularly need me.

I didn’t think this would cause a crisis of identity. I thought I was an Artist more than anything else. Or simply Myself. Even though biology kicked in hard in my mid-twenties and I longed for a baby, for my child, I still wrote books during his naps. I got back to gigging and traveling as he got older and relished the simplicity of being responsible only for myself. When he was three, four, five, his dad and I decided we were one-and-done; I didn’t need to have another kid to satisfy a creative urge. I was a Mother. I had a Child. I had a Family.

And now… “family” doesn’t have the shape of two parents, a clean fridge, a cabin on a lake, a chocolate lab. It doesn’t even have bedtime stories. To be honest, I did not think ahead about this stage, this transition, at all. I’ve never been a Five Year Planner– it’s always seemed so far off and murky. But because I trust my son will graduate from high school on schedule, I am able to imagine how, in just a couple more years, I could go live in France for a while if I still want to. But the in-between time is baffling me: I’m here, but it’s not the here I expected it to be. I myself am also kind and sweet and (at least in the face of others’ distress) positive– I am full of qualities I like and which do well in the world. But I come home to no one but the cat, and somehow that invalidates, erases, renders moot everything else. 

My son does not need bedtime snuggles, but it appears that I do. Maybe it’s time for me to parent myself, but the one attempting to do the parenting is often as over-tired and unreasonable as that toddler at the library. 

I’ve thought about how everything changed when I became pregnant. How it was both the most intimate, connected experience, and also the most alone: no one else was in it but me, however much the very excited father-to-be offered support. I’ve thought back to making the long drive into town with a newborn every week to go to ECFE so I could be with other mothers and their babies, with others whose lives looked like mine: nursing and nighttimes and diapers and interpreting a whole new language and living in service to something both beautiful and brutal. And I am sure there must be gatherings of forty-something divorced moms who are also, as my friend put it, currently experiencing life as “Newtonian Substances: liquid unless suddenly struck, and then solid.” When I was pregnant, the fact that Something Was Happening was obvious. I had check-ups, and anyone with eyes could see that things were progressing to a dramatic, significant change. Even though my son has grown and grown over the years and now towers over me, I am as surprised as if I were one of those teen magazine “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant” stories: How did this happen? What do I do now?

Which is the question: What am I to do with this new life? Or, more simply: Who am I now? It’s as hard to catch my breath, as overly-roomy as it was in the days after giving birth. It’s not so different from that first moment I held my child and thought: who is this? It took a full twenty-four hours to know in my bones that the child I nursed was the same one I had been falling in love with over the many swelling months. Maybe I will wake up– or sit up late some night– and suddenly recognize myself. Oh! It’s you! I know you! And more: I love you.

Maybe this heaving need for family is really the need for remembering myself. Maybe, when I am familiar once again, I will be satisfied, fulfilled, overjoyed, to come home, each night, to myself.

Photo by Liana Mikah on Unsplash