The Calendar

There is one month left until Lacey leaves for university. I am standing in my kitchen with a cup of coffee, staring at a photo of my youngest daughter on our fridge. She is eight in the photo, wearing a white dress for her first communion, showing off the professional curls in her naturally bone-straight hair. Her life is simple in this photo. She is pretty, and she knows it. Everything within the perimeter of this photo is simple and perfect and when I look at my darling daughter’s sweet soft face on the fridge, I can ignore the chaos that existed outside the edges of this snapshot – Rebecca and Sarah fighting like wild hyena’s over whose turn it was to load the dishwasher, and Mary’s meltdown over her most recent math grade. There is no tension, no yelling, no sadness in this photo – only a sweet innocent smile and soft expensive curls. Beside the collage of fridge photos is what we all refer to as ‘The Calendar’. The Calendar is a magnetic dry-erase board with thirty-one squares that I have been using for decades to manage the activities, appointments and whereabouts of everyone in the family. The Calendar used to be crammed full - six coloured markers were used to represent each of us at any given time. When the girls were younger, varying combos of the four of them would fight over who got to be pink and as they grew older the arguments eventually shifted into who had to be pink. Since I have always had the fewest markings on The Calendar, I have always been black - easy to spot in the chaotic rainbow of other marks. Now The Calendar is nearly bare. A few squares a week marked in blue show Lacey at work, or out with friends, but for the most part the calendar remains marked with the ghostly silhouettes of the past that I have been unable to fully erase, marring the original white surface. There is one day on The Calendar, that I am dreading – the day Lacey leaves for university.

There are thirty days until my fourth child moves away, and I will be officially off duty - at least until Thanksgiving. There are twelve years between Lacey and her eldest sister Mary, so John and I have dropped kids off at university before. This isn’t our first time packing up the SUV, kissing goodbye at a residence building, or - letting go of our children. I can’t help but wonder why sending our first-born daughter off to university, although emotional, felt like a triumphant milestone, and sending our youngest child off to university feels like a funeral? Mary and Sarah are both moved out and living their own lives. Rebecca is finishing her final year of studies at a school one province away and she spent the summer working out there. The house has been quiet all year, except for holidays when it is full of our kids and their partners or friends.

           Lacey comes downstairs to the kitchen, grabs a muffin from the plastic container on the counter, kisses the top of my head (she’s two inches taller than me) and heads out the door to work. She has three weeks left at her part-time job as a day-camp counselor. She loves working with the kids but hates that she is missing out on her final days of freedom as a kid herself before she starts her life as a “grown-up”. I’ve explained to her that she is not quite a grown-up yet and not to rush herself. She’s only seventeen and I have tried to encourage her to take an extra year to work and save money, but truthfully, the only person who wants Lacey to spend another year at home is me – and maybe John - but he won’t admit it. I take a sip of my coffee, then the tears come.

           I became a mother at the age of twenty and raising my kids has been my only career which means, most of my life has not really been about me. I have spent thirty years filling up my home and my life, with the voices, needs and activities of my children – and macaroni art, lots of macaroni art - and I would not have had it any other way. In one month, my house will be empty and I feel as though I am being fired or forced to retire. My husband will get up like he does every morning, drink his coffee, do his crossword puzzle, kiss me goodbye and go to work where he knows he excels at the job he has been doing for twenty-five years. And then what? What happens after that? There will be no lunches for me to pack, no kids to take to school, no sticky kisses goodbye, no homework to help with, no chores to assign, no afterschool activities to drive to. It will be just me and our dog Ralph, alone in our much too quiet house, with no noise, or chaos and a bare, white, vacant The Calendar.

                                                     ***

“Have you considered that your grief about Lacey leaving has more to do with your fear of being alone than it does with potentially missing her?” 

I’m sitting in my therapist’s office, telling her that I know the kids are supposed to grow up and move out, I know that they aren’t dead and my life isn’t over. I know they come home for holidays, that this is a beginning, that there needs to be more to my life than my kids activities on The Calendar. I know all these things, and yet – I am crying every day. Lacey leaves in one week and I have been doing my best to hide my grief from her by paying $140.00 for fifty-minute sessions to cry to my therapist who has no children of her own and is nearly fifteen years younger than me. What the heck does she know about what I’m feeling?

“I mean…of course I’m going to miss her! She’s my baby. We’re close. I love spending time with her and…”

I stop. Processing the question. I’m not afraid of being alone - am I? How often over the past thirty years have a sought out, planned, begged for and relished time alone? How often had I dragged myself out of bed early just to enjoy the quiet and stillness of the house before someone shoved a sippy cup in my face and begged for “mowha duce”? Is this what Aunt Ivy means when she says “The days are long but the years are short.”? Am I just never satisfied? When my house was full, I wanted the quiet and now that I have the quiet do I want it full again? What is the matter with me? I start sobbing and grab a tissue from the table beside me. My therapist smiles at me, her expression sympathetic.

“And what?” She says.

I inhale, aware that what I am about to say out loud is a cliché, and that cliché’s are often rooted in truth.

“I am, afraid of being alone,” I say, my voice quavering, “because when I was alone in the past, I was alone with a very specific identity. Whether I was at the gym or the coffee shop or savouring a few minutes in the shower while the kids watched TV, I had a role I was escaping from temporarily. I wasn’t going to stop being Mom when I was doing those things. Being alone was a tiny break, but it wasn’t an entire identity shift. This time, when I’m alone – I’m going to stay alone aren’t I? Instead of ten minutes or an hour in between being Mom, I’m going to have to go weeks or months and yeah, I know I’m still their mother, but it’s not the same. I don’t know who I am supposed to be when no one needs me. I sob into my Kleenex, feeling old and pathetic and ashamed. My therapist leans forward,

“Who do you want to be?”

She asks this gently, as though somewhere deep down I know the answer to this question. But I don’t. I don’t know who I want to be, because I don’t really know who I am.

                                                      ***

           Lacey, John and I are sitting on the sofa watching re-runs of Master Chef on TV. It has been our favourite family show for years and it is responsible for Lacey’s bourgeoning interest in cooking. Lacey is leaning against John, her head tucked under his chin and her hand is in mine so I can warm her cold fingers. This is the last time we will sit together like this, I think, biting hard on the inside of my cheek so I don’t cry. Tomorrow morning, John and I will load up our SUV with our youngest daughter and everything she will need for her first year at university. She isn’t going far, only a few hours by car, but to me it feels like the other side of the planet. When she is no longer under my roof will she remember to eat regularly? Will she change the sheets on her bed? Take her vitamins? Did I teach her how to floss properly? Did I help her grow into a good human? Have I done enough? I have asked myself the same questions about Mary, Sarah and Rebecca, and I know that by this stage in the game, whatever I have left to teach any of my kids will have to happen now through my own example, forwarded news articles or passive-aggressive Instagram reels.

***

           The three of us are pulling up to Lacey’s residence building. It is red brick and very ugly, likely designed in the 1970’s. I feel my stomach tighten. This is where my daughter lives now. Lacey is practically vibrating she is so excited and before John can properly park the car she has jumped out to stretch her legs and take it all in. I shove my travel coffee mug in the cup holder and slide out of the car to join her once John turns off the engine. I smile at Lacey, taking in her excitement.

“Ok, let’s do this ladies!”

John says, and the three of us start to empty the SUV.

                                                    ***

           The parents aren’t supposed to hang around and ruin the vibe on campus. We are to drop off our precious cargo, kiss them goodbye and vamoose. In less than an hour we have moved Lacey into her tiny dorm and hugged and kissed her goodbye at least one hundred times each. I have managed not to cry, although my eyes misted a bit when Lacey reminded me that I didn’t need to hug her like I would never see her again, “I’ll be home in like, two months Mom.”

For me they would be two very long months. John and I are now making the three-hour drive home, with an empty SUV and I’m still trying not to cry, when John reaches for my hand. He’s quiet. I know he feels the emptiness too.

           As soon as we enter the house John says he is going to the gym, he needs to move his body after all that driving, but I know he isn’t ready to hang around our empty nest just yet. He kisses me on the cheek and says,

“How bout’ when I get back we go to that vegetarian place you like for dinner?”

The vegetarian place that we could never go to with Lacey because,

“I need something more substantial than just veggies Mom.”

I tell him that sounds great.

           After John leaves, I go upstairs and enter each of the four bedrooms that have been sanctuaries to my children over the years. In each room, I stand in the doorway and allow the memories to flood me. Mary’s old room is now filled with storage bins, but for me, the stacked bins evaporate, and as if it were yesterday, I can almost see Mary arranging tiny furniture in her beloved doll house while she sings softly to herself. In Sarah’s old room, the white walls of the now guest room morph into pink, and I recall her tiny white bed with “Pink Teddy,” who sat sentinel as she kissed and tucked in a dozen stuffies each morning before leaving for kindergarten. In Rebecca’s room, which is untouched, I watch as the Stranger Things posters dissolve into My-Little-Pony wall decals, and I remember the crayons that used to lay scattered across her floor as she practiced drawing the “perfect” rainbow. In Lacey’s room, I sit on the bed and allow myself to time travel for only a few minutes more. I smooth my palm along her bright pink Barbie quilt, the one she begged for when she turned ten. That was the year she insisted, “Mama, I’m too big for bedtime stories.” and the year we read Little Women to each other under this very quilt – at bedtime. I let myself feel the emptiness and loss, and I don’t berate myself. The biggest, most consuming, most important part of my life is over now - just. Like. That. I inhale the thick quiet of the present and exhale the thin sounds of the past, and then I stand up and I go get ready for dinner with John.

                                                        ***

           It’s been one month since we moved Lacey into her university residence. I’m standing in my kitchen with a cup of coffee, my eyes scanning the dozen or more photos on my fridge. As my eyes bounce over the faces of each of my children in these photos I start to feel the familiar sadness – the missing of the people who gave me my identity for most of my life, and the fear of being alone in this quiet house without a solid purpose. Last week my therapist suggested I am too attached to the perfect past that nostalgia has sold me. I think about this and decide to take a moment and peer around the edges of these photos to remind myself of the life that was happening beyond the sweet smiles and goofy faces. Just outside the camera frame of these images are mountains of diapers and laundry, tantrums, and meltdowns over homework, refusals to eat the healthy dinner I spent an hour cooking, worries over first dates, bad grades, stomach flus and mental health. There are gargantuan parenting fails and guilt and lost tempers and so much exhaustion. The photos on my fridge are lovely reminders of the deep joy I have taken in raising my family but remembering some of the moments that got us here – the more challenging or painful moments that were never captured by a camera, I feel something shift inside me. As the morning sun warms my bare feet, I think about the frenzied mornings of the past, the rude teens, racing out the door – late again, the disrespectful eyerolls, the “I hate you!”’s, the never-enough-sleep and the “mowah duce!”. I sip my coffee, aware that I am enjoying the peace in the house and I shift my gaze The Calendar. There is still a lot more white visible than there has been in the past, but I have a few new things I need to add for this month: ‘Dentist appointment’ (tomorrow), ‘Coffee with Jen and Sherry’ (next Friday), ‘Watercolour class’ (Tuesday Mornings), ‘Zoomba class’ (Wednesday afternoons), and one I am most excited about, ‘Complete Mature Student Application’ (for the Early Childhood Education Program at our local university). Perhaps I can take my love of raising children and turn it into a marketable skill? I have loved my identity as Mom, but now I am working on a new identity, one that is just for me. I put my coffee cup down on the counter and reach for a dry-erase marker from the small mason jar next to the fridge. I pick up the black marker and remove the cap but before I can write anything on The Calendar I change my mind. I replace the cap, return the marker to the jar and chew my bottom lip while I shift the markers around with my fingers. When I finally chose a marker, I laugh out loud because this time I get to be pink when I make my mark on The Calendar.