I am having an odd experience. Not strange, but one that is strangely absent in many discussions of parenthood. At least in the discussions I had over the years. The closest descriptive term for the emotional aspect of my odd experience is grief. Yet no one died as such. On the contrary: the child who precipitated this patch of dark rain in my soul has graduated, not just from college, but it seems, from his original (and perhaps habitual) attachment to home. He has stepped into a very bright, sunny clearing, the soil of which is alien to me. As it should be.
For some months now it was becoming obvious that this son will not to come home any time soon, at least not as the kid whose room I kept intact pretty much the way he left when we took that first heart-wrenching trip to Madison, Wisconsin, to drop him off at his dorm room. Not that he hasn’t been home since then. He has been home every chance he got, at least for the first three years of college. He had even spent an entire summer at home, working and adding to the chaos of electronics debris, papers galore, and other stuff in his room and closet. But I kept all of it, including the mad quilt on the walls of those almost-pornographic pictures of cars from the years of plenty not so long ago, like the gleaming silver silhouette of a Chrysler Sebring -- but I digress.
A week ago, around graduation time, when my son hesitated to commit himself to a date on which he would come home before starting work even farther from here, on the east coast, it became obvious to me that I had to break free of that room of his childhood as much as he already had.
So, for the last three days I have been hauling down boxes and boxes of dead electronics, dusty papers, broken toys, the odd adult magazine, homework from elementary school, stuffed animals, and all such stuff that has been at one time or another a very significant piece in this former child’s daily life. With each box I took down, though, I felt a rise in guilt, as if I had betrayed him in some way. Then, today, it dawned on me: the mother in me was horrified at what looked to her like a disposal of the things of a “departed” child. A child who had died.
The fact is that a “child” did die. To make room for the man.
Now it is my turn to let go. Not just of that “child,” but also of his mother. And this I do, I am realizing, with each box I take out of that room. By tomorrow, most of those things that make him persist in the different stages of a boyhood so ingrained in my experience as his mother, will be gone. Soon there will be a lot more space in the room, a patch of emptiness where, as I see it now, I can, at least, attempt to let go for the sake of both of us.
