Starting now....
In an effort to be consistent with change, it felt only right to start a new blog. I am not sure where this is going, but I do know that as in the past writing seems to be the way I go. I write for me as a measure of sorting, analyzing and reflecting.
As I sat with my 93 year old mom today, I had this overwhelming sense of endings. My mom, though very mentally intact, struggles as the arthritis plummets her. Don't get me wrong the lady does not let it stop her. It just takes her so much longer to just get up from the chair that forms her small body. For her its just the process, for me its so much more. I spent hours with her. Watching TV, eating and just sitting. She tells me she's chilly and in role reversal I become her mom. I put the blanket around her small frame and I put my arm around her and we sit quietly for a while. She dozes and I can feel her breathing gently and I am so grateful for that moment. I let her sleep and when she wakes she tells me she did not sleep at all. I smile.
This past summer I sent of my one and only 17 year old away to college. What I thought would be a time that I've waited for with excitement for all the things I was going to do......is actually a time where I am fighting to not go to bed at 9pm on a Saturday night. I am 48 years old and single, living in the city for the first time since my 20's. I had believed that I'd pick up where I'd left off. Aha, but alas the problem. At 48, my peers are all married engaging in the mid life activities of family. While all my friends are dealing with children coming back home from college, and keeping their 20 year old marriages interesting, I am seeking to start all over again.
Married twice, I am, at 48 ready to enjoy my partners company, travel and relish in the moments when for a small amount of time I don't have to worry that my son is out driving or if he will miss his curfew. Its suppose to be a time where I am financially stable and my partner is also in the same place. Where is this partner? The reality is that an empty nest is harder than I understood it to be. I miss my son and his empty room in our new city apartment is a constant reminder to me that maybe a one bedroom would have suffice. Even when he comes home, he goes home to the suburbs where he grew up and he can resent my leaving his life behind.
At this moment, I sit at the kitchen counter writing. My son is visiting his friends and his old neighborhood and will come home in time to take the bus back to school after the weekend. It seems like a lifetime ago when I was a young married wife, thinking that that was it. That the life I'd enter would be unchanging in any drastic way. Now, I start all over as if that life never happened.
Married twice, I am, at 48 ready to enjoy my partners company, travel and relish in the moments when for a small amount of time I don't have to worry that my son is out driving or if he will miss his curfew. Its suppose to be a time where I am financially stable and my partner is also in the same place. Where is this partner? The reality is that an empty nest is harder than I understood it to be. I miss my son and his empty room in our new city apartment is a constant reminder to me that maybe a one bedroom would have suffice. Even when he comes home, he goes home to the suburbs where he grew up and he can resent my leaving his life behind.
At this moment, I sit at the kitchen counter writing. My son is visiting his friends and his old neighborhood and will come home in time to take the bus back to school after the weekend. It seems like a lifetime ago when I was a young married wife, thinking that that was it. That the life I'd enter would be unchanging in any drastic way. Now, I start all over as if that life never happened.
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