Perhaps This Is What I Need

Reflection on Two Mother-Goodbyes in Three Years

Perhaps This Is What I Need

Fixing chai in a strange pot and pouring it into a red mug I have never used, stepping outside into 54 degrees with a real feel of 52.

And the rain is falling. 

An orange and white sherbet cat slinks down a worn wooden border wall just past the Airbnb front porch. He glances back at me before hopping down the wall and disappearing along the gravel road.

The sight of the feral cat brings to mind last night, dropping my son off at his new house—which is quite an old house—that he now shares with 11 others. We spotted a gaze of raccoons clustering in the small parking area, pausing a moment before scurrying into the night. 

My son asked if I was okay by myself at the Airbnb.

I am not usually by myself. But perhaps this is what I need right now.

To wake late on a rainy morning when the forecast yesterday said only a 20% chance of rain. To fix chai on a gas stove and wander outdoors to wonder at the gray sky.

Tibetan prayer flags flutter from their hanging over the porch and some are tear-stained from the falling rain.

They bring to mind my journey to India at 16, then to Kathmandu a month after turning 17. I walked hills strung with prayer flags, paused beside two wrinkled monks in saffron robes playing wind instruments. They paid me no mind as I posed, wondering at so many sights.

In Kathmandu, Nepal, October of 1999. I’m 17 years old.

Is it the nature of time passing or me, here, now in the process of setting up a child-who-is-no-longer-a-child to step out on his own that causes me to consider that trip from my parents’ perspective?

I picture my mom watering her garden, the water spraying from the hose her rosary, her prayer flags. I wonder how tear stained that garden was from moments praying for her six children.

My chai has grown cold. 

My sister texts me. She has sent an article by a mom on a similar journey, visiting colleges with her son and standing in that space between.

Spaces between are always so liminal, so thin. They expose the thin places within me.

My son is an adult now, having turned 18 a few days ago, but I wonder how that happened when I do not feel like an adult entirely but instead standing in some place between and wondering if I'll ever have it figured out.

Are we all just winging it day by day, even the oldest among us? 

And of course, this time brings to mind the days I spent in Florida with my daughter, getting her set up, shopping for her dorm … and she, even younger than my son now—starting college days before her 17th birthday. How is it that three years have already passed since then?

I walked with her outside the campus toward a waiting Uber that would take me 2,000 miles away and back home. We shared her umbrella and the air was Florida late-summer sticky.

I hugged her goodbye and said she'd do great and I was proud of her. I blinked back tears—in part because I didn’t want her to see them and in part because I knew once they started, I would not be able to stop their flow.

I kept blinking them back because then it was an Uber ride and hours at the airport with a flight delayed a half hour at a time and then delayed overnight. I spent that night in between spaces but blessed by the sudden hospitality of strangers yet wishing for a bit more time with my daughter.

All those moments keeping back tears, just trying to get home.

And then I was home, arriving around dinner time the day before school started up again for the boys and me as a teacher. My husband made spaghetti and I saw four places set and blinked back tears once more, realizing it would be a while before all five of us sat around the table again. 

How many times I took for granted being seated as a family around a table, together breaking bread.

And so, perhaps this is what I needed …

Tears sometimes have to wait a while and when they finally venture outside they are not just for the one day but for those long moments in between. 

After taking a photo of the prayer flags, I scroll down my phone’s photos and pause at one I took of Allen and me, a selfie at a small town we passed on the drive up.

Strange how it’s so recent, taken mere days ago, yet seems to be an image from another era, like we passed some kind of threshold between that time and this and there is no going back to those former spaces.

The sky will clear as will my eyes.

I will spend the day shopping with my son and one of his new roommates (a boy a couple weeks younger than him) and I will be glad that my son is making friends, glad at the knowledge that he will not be alone.

I will spend the next few days sitting in on class introductions, taking notes as if I am the one in college once more, glad at the knowledge that my son will be busy with assignments and papers and likely more reading than he would like. Busy establishing himself in a new community, finding joy and purpose and—as man is born to do—trouble in its various forms.

The sun-faded prayer flags flutter above me, borne by a breeze that would carry them far if they were not secured to this space.

The rain-stained red flag represents, among other things, transformation. The yellow flag, earth and stability, groundedness. Blue—vastness like the open range of sky. Green—balance and the nurturing of water and rain. White—compassion, wind, life.

I pray all these for my children—the two who have taken steps out into the circling world and the one still at home. I pray for compassion with balance, groundedness with transformation, hearts open as the sky.

I pray the ruach-wind will carry them far, yet they remain secured to heart-and-home spaces, tethered to ancient masts that will hold them fast through the fiercest storm.