Entry #10 ~ Eighteen...

“My little boy was no more and even though he'd come home for vacations, our relationship would never be quite the same. Just as he would have to learn to be an adult in the world, so would I have to learn to live without him.”  Sallyann Murphey

She’s 18 now.

She can vote.

Get a tattoo without my permission.

Fight for our country.

And yet, with the myriad of choices in front of her on her birthday last Saturday, the first thing she wanted to do with her new-found ‘freedom’? Buy a lottery ticket.

I had to laugh.

So much a young woman; so much still my baby, my little girl.

I blinked.

I blinked and she grew up, right in front of my eyes.

Empty-nesting for couples is different than it is for someone like me.

And now she’s gone. Not forever, but from my day to day.

I feel lost. Not a wandering-without-purpose kind of lost, but lost still the same.

When you’re one half of an ‘us’, you still have each other when your youngest leaves home. Whether you take advantage of all the empty spaces in your day to get to know each other all over again or you move ahead side by side but not together, you still have someone taking the journey with you; someone to share the exhilaration of having free time, of choosing your own schedule, of no more taxi service and plenty of hot water for showers. You can celebrate your solitude or tumble forward into partnered adventures. You’ve got each other’s back, each other’s heart. You’ve got each other.

For me, the honeymoon phase of my single parent empty nesting is over. Kaput. Gone.

For every smile at the now consistent state of my house’s cleanliness, there is a slight melancholy at the lack of random items scattered throughout the house.

No more bobby pins on the bathroom counter.

No pile of shoes at the back door.

No empty orange juice cartons in the fridge.

I actually find myself missing the white noise, the music coming up through the floorboards, the sound of the washing machine starting up at midnight.

Her first couple of visits home were rough. I think it was the combination of a lot of things, including my having to adjust to the disruption of my new status quo, and her learning how to assert herself in her new independence while having to adapt at the transition between living with a group of other young adults and returning to momma bear’s lair.

I looked forward to her walking through the door, and then I couldn’t wait for her to leave to go back to school.

She talked about missing me, and then was out the door and visiting friends as soon as she got home.

It took some time, but something seemed to ‘click’ last weekend, and we were back to being ‘mudder and dodder’. Best friends. Partners in crime.

By default or by design, she spent the bulk of her 18^th birthday with me. Oh sure, I didn’t have her all to myself, but I didn’t mind sharing her with some very dear friends and some of her father’s family.

We travelled for a couple of hours in the car, talking about school and how much she loves her music class and what ‘we’ would do with the money if her lottery ticket proved to be a winner.

We visited her father’s cousin’s family farm, and she had a great time -- from the haywagon ride to feeding the alpacas to picking pumpkins & potatoes to the birthday cake made from her Great-Grandma’s famous chocolate cake recipe.

She slept for most of the way home. I was misty-eyed for a good part of that drive, looking over at her and remembering the times when she was little and when she would tumble into dreamland, completely tuckered out by all of the fresh air and fun from one of our many outdoor adventures.

Do I wish she was little again? Sometimes.

But for every wish that she was a baby, a toddler, a little girl again, there are great leaps of joy and immeasurable smiles at the amazing young lady she has become and the woman she is yet to be.

I like her. I really like her.

Forget the fact that I am her mother and that I love her; that part’s a given.

I enjoy her company, her thoughtfulness, her intuitiveness.

Eighteen.

It doesn’t seem possible.

In his book, The Christmas Box Miracle: My Spiritual Journey of Destiny, Healing and Hope,    American author, Richard Paul Evans, writes: “Dance. Dance for the joy and breath of childhood. Dance for all children, including that child who is still somewhere entombed beneath the responsibility and skepticism of adulthood. Embrace the moment before it escapes from our grasp. For the only promise of childhood, of any childhood, is that it will someday end. And in the end, we must ask ourselves what we have given our children to take its place. And is it enough?”

From this single parent’s perspective, ‘enough’ is all a matter of perception.

There are a lot of things I couldn’t afford to give my girls, but we visited waterfalls and went for long walks and played dress-up and wrote each other letters and took plenty of pictures.

We talked about the world and our places in it.

We laughed and cried and fought and made up.

We told each other ‘I love you’.

Often.

We still do.

In his book, The Book of Lost Things, author John Connolly wrote that “in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.”

The kidlet and I are both at the same place right now, teetering between adult and child. I’m fully supportive of her wanting explore the possibility of a co-op term overseas, and she is willing to tolerate my tendency to dance in the rain.

It’s enough…