I woke up from a dream the other night with tears streaming down my face and my heart heavy in my chest. I have no idea what I was dreaming about but the sadness was so real and so very crushing. I laid there, wiping my eyes, shifting to get comfortable, and failing to remember what it is that made me so sad. I would have liked to have given it more time and thought, but it was about 2 in the morning, and I am perpetually exhausted, so sleep won out over wonder.
If I am honest, and I truly don’t recall the dream, I know why I would wake up in the middle of the night crying. But if I am honest, I have to admit things, and if I admit them, I can’t hide behind laughter and jokes, and if I can’t hide behind these things, then I am faced with what is making me so very sad, and if I have to face what is making me so very sad, I can no longer deny it is happening, and if I can’t deny it, well, I guess I just wake up crying. It is very “if you give a mouse a cookie” where I am the mouse and the cookie is more of a gut-punch.
The fact is that in twenty-nine days, I will load my daughter’s car up with her and her things and move her to her dad’s in Dallas. She will stay there for a month or so and then start at UNT in January. This is a great thing! I told her she needed to do this great thing! I actually sort of two-hand pushed her into doing this great thing. I did it because she needs it. Her life, like so many others, has been on hold since about two months before her high school graduation. I don’t want to be crass or insensitive and call it a casualty of COVID, but the class of 2020 and their hopes and initial dreams really took a beating.
So while I encourage this change for her, while I support it and nurture it, and help her plan to make it happen, I am so very sad. This is the end to what was normal for the last almost twenty years. Until the divorce, I don’t think I ever went more than a night or two without being with her or her brother. I worry about her on her own, I worry about me without her here, and I worry about her brother who does not know a life without her physically present in it every single day. They are currently dealing with their own feelings about this by arguing over who gets the PS4 and looking to me like Solomon to decide and I am like “split your own damn baby.”
This really sums up their relationship.
I know that I have been lucky, so lucky, to have had an extra almost two years with her at home. Enough time to make me be really sick of the fact that she never changes a toilet paper roll. She will take the time to perch a new one on top of the old one, but never switch it out. I have had time to try to back away from her day-to-day and let her figure things out. I have had time to get to see her as the adult she is becoming, while also tripping over her shoes and yelling at her to please bring down the ten coffee cups in her room. It is a real narrow edge we walk between being very tired of one another and very dependent on the other in our normal lives. And if you know this person, you know she is amazing and full of potential she has never realized and won’t realize if I am still doing laundry for her because she knows if she starts it, I will finish it. And I know this. My brain knows this. My heart, however, is very, very sad.
When they were little, she and her brother used to snuggle up with me on the couch before bed. One on my left, one in my lap. They would smell like babies and bath time and they would giggle and watch shows with wide-eyed wonder and kick their footie-pajama feet and the world would be so good in that time before bed. I miss this time. I miss innocence and wonder and make-believe and dress-up and her creating worlds to drag her brother through. I miss nap time and ice cream melting all over their little faces before they even get to the cone. And there is really no recreating this. We all recently sat almost this close together on a flight and I did not feel happy and at peace; I felt annoyed and squished.
I miss them being little and I am scared about her being gone. Not for her; she will eventually figure it all out. But for me. I am scared of not being needed, scared of being an obligatory phone call on the weekends, scared of being left behind. Scared of figuring out who and what I am supposed to be when I am down a kid and then another kid right after. I really should have spaced them out better.
So, there, I admit it. I am scared and I am sad and I miss them being little and I don’t know how to plan for a life with just me and this is a whole mess on top of life and I am tired. Someone please just get me a cookie.
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