They Are Always My Babies

It's been almost two weeks since Jessie and Vergil's wedding and I can't believe it. It's as if that all happened on a different planet in a different time and in a way, it was. And now Jessie and Vergil are in Bhutan if all has gone as planned and I haven't heard from them in days.
It's okay. I didn't expect to. But there is part of me which is lost and drifting somewhere on the other side of the planet even as they are, I am sure, quite firmly planted on it.

When my oldest two were little ones I got divorced from their father and having grown up without a father of my own, it was of utmost importance to me that their father play as strong and important a role in their lives as could be arranged. He was a musician and so his weekend was generally on Monday and Tuesday and those were the days he took the children to his house and those days without them almost killed me.
I realize now I went through a horrible depression. I was in nursing school and I couldn't stop for anything. I had classes, I had schoolwork, I had a house to take care of. I had them. And so I managed in those days before there were decent antidepressants by simply putting one foot in front of the other but on the days when they were gone it was a terrible struggle. I finally learned to cope by simply shutting off, as much as possible, the very thought of them because if I didn't, I would have gone mad. If the weather changed and I realized I hadn't packed the right clothes I would panic and the anxiety would consume me. I would cry and cry, wondering if they missed me, knowing how much I missed them, feeling sick with the knowledge that I had broken our family even though, in truth, I had not broken it so much as simply made legal the break that was already there.
But. The guilt. The pain. The panic. The fear.
And so I finally learned to just shut it off because if I had not, I truly think I would have gone quite mad.

When each child moved out of the house as they grew to adulthood, I think I used that same coping mechanism. Not quite, but a bit of it. I used that ability to just...let...go. What else could I do? At one point when she was perhaps nineteen, twenty, maybe not that old? May decided to buy a small truck, fit it out for camping, and drive across the country. These were pre-cellphone days and every molecule in my body screamed, "No! Don't let her go!" but there was nothing for it but to give her my blessing. She was legally an adult and besides, when I was nineteen I myself had driven from Denver to Tallahassee all by myself except for two parakeets in a cage in the back seat of my car.
And so I did. I let her go and as she traveled I was grateful for that ability to shut off the images, the thoughts of all that could be happening to her and she was fine. And I, too, survived.

But now I am older, so much older, and I believe my ability to let go and let the universe (to put it in  terms which I am not quite comfortable with but it is the best I can do at the moment) has either grown less strong or else I am just more aware of what is truly going on in all parts of my mind and heart. I don't know. But I do know that even as I am perfectly confident in Jessie and Vergil's ability to make their way across continents and countries safely, I know that I am feeling some anxiety and it is nothing more than the loosening of the cord which binds us as she has stretched it so far- from Asheville to Bhutan- and this morning I dreamed that her father and I had moved into a new house and that all of my children were there and it was chaos but wonderful, too, not unlike how we all were together in Asheville, and perhaps my mind is going back two weeks to that time, to remind me that no matter what, no matter where, all will be well. We are family. We always, no matter what the circumstances or place, come back together again.

I do not think of myself as a clinging mother. Not at all. I have sent off each of my children with full-hearted blessing at one time or another and they have all survived, although I am sure that they all went through things which would give me one heart attack after another if I were to truly know about, and so, quite frankly, I do not wish to know. But is this really my true personality? Is this seeming-ease I have at letting go merely a survival instinct which I have tapped into out of desperation when necessity arose?

I don't know. But I do know that as happy and thrilled as I am for Jessie to be seeing and experiencing things far beyond the world that I know of myself, I will also be so very happy when she and her husband are home and I hear that they are safe.
I would never, in a million years, want them not to have gone and when I say that, it is the real and honest truth.
But it is also the real and honest truth that when the return (on Jessie's birthday, the birthday which, up until this year, she has always shared with her grandmother), and I hear her voice again, there will be a settling in my heart, my gut, my blood and bones.

I want to have given my children wings and I want them to use them to fly away and to see what there is to see, of course. To experience new things, to learn, to become aware that this is a great, huge, beautiful, planet. To have their eyes opened, their hearts opened. But oh, Lord. How I also want them to use those same wings to fly back, too, where I can get my hands on them if need be.

That is what I am thinking about this morning as I wait for my grandsons to arrive.

Happy Friday, y'all.

Love...Ms. Moon