It comes in waves.
No one died. I keep telling myself that. Mike and I dropped Nick off at college three days ago. It’s normal that he went to college, healthy. Throughout millennia, billions of women have watched their children go out into the world. I tell myself that this is what I am supposed to do, a sign that I did my job. Some moms had to send seven year old children away to apprentice. I had more time than that. The separation was already happening between us. We were ready.
That’s what I tell myself.
My grandma used to crochet great volumes of articles that no one seemed to need. Even then, I did not use doilies, or scarves after the third one in an odd combination of colors, or toilet paper covers with the half-barbie doll standing in a wide, pink toilet-paper-roll-shaped dress. There were green and orange hats that were either too large, too small, or weird with flaps and droopy brims. There were lumpy purple slippers with flopping yellow pom-poms. There were dining-table-sized doilies that left drinking glasses listing to the left if placed on a thick crocheted knot. I had bright yellow and blue throw blankets on every couch and chair made with scratchy polyester yarn. I had place mats made of granny squares in orange and pink.
I dreaded complimenting anything Grandma was working on or recently bought because before I left, she would have packed it in an old plastic grocery bag and tucked it under the seat of my car where I wouldn’t find it until I arrived home or some time later when I was looking for something I’d dropped as I drove. She gave me crystal pitchers and gold trimmed grandma vases because I’d simply said they were nice when she’d showed them to me. It was awful, knowing that I now owned a gaudy ornamental doodad I didn’t want and she was going to miss out on displaying this thing she thought was beautiful.
Though I had a good job, Grandma put wads of money in my purse when I wasn’t looking.
It was embarrassing, a show of neediness that I could barely tolerate.
Whenever I left, Grandma, it seemed, would not be able to breathe properly until I came to visit again.
Grandma needed to be needed.
I get that now. I knew it then, superficially, but I understand now. In my bones, I understand.
I have a job to go to where I work with children. Some of those children need to hug me. Lots of them thank me for my help. Some make me work harder by resisting in the same way Nick did when he was little. I have to care for two cats and a dog. They let me hold them like babies. Seth stands here on my lap as I type, making it hard to see the keyboard. I still cook for Mike, though I suspect I’m buying too much at the grocery store. And there’s editing and cleaning to accomplish, and geometry I have to review to keep up with a student I might tutor at work. I have plenty to do, plenty more I could volunteer to do if I didn’t.
I am not without purpose.
But I’ve been floating around wondering what I should do next, feeling that it would be easy to become useless and out-of-date. When I sit at home thinking of the next thing on my list of things to do, I’m afraid I’m about to become irrelevant, like a set of orange and pink place mats made of scratchy polyester yarn that wouldn’t even go home from a garage sale to a new and useful life.
It’s only been three days. I miss my boy. I feel irrelevant.
Thank you for listening, jules