OTHERHOOD

I have thought about my children’s departure from the moment they were born. Some might find this strange, but a heightened understanding of the marriage of love and grief has always been with me: losing my father early in life seared this awareness into my DNA. It’s not easy to hold love and grief together in my heart, but there they reside.

For me, having and raising my children was the joy and highlight of my life, and I knew it even as it was happening. A house full of silliness and little voices, baby chicks in the bathtub, dogs underfoot and pet rats on the kitchen counter was pure happiness. Surrounded by love and connected to purpose, I’d finally found my place. It was everything.

But now, the house is quiet. I have gone from everything to what often feels like nothing. I know that’s not true, but if often feels true. I find myself not only navigating the pangs of an empty nest—which are, I will tell you, wrenchingly real—but doing it alone, having become single at a rather uneasy stage of life. The timing of it all is terrible, but, no doubt, meaningful. Just wipe the entire slate clean. Turn the page. All endings are also beginnings and all that.

My son called me from college the other day and, in the course of catching me up, blithely mentioned that he likely wouldn’t be coming home this next summer. I was gutted. After we ended the call, I told myself all the very true but unhelpful things: “He’s 21. Of course he wants to be with his friends, make movies, live his life. He’s individuating. You’ve done a good job. You’ve prepared him to be on his own.”

Wonderful.

The empty nest is a silent sort of grief. On the one hand, my heart feels bruised and bereft. On the other hand, I’m proud of my children and delighted for their wondrous futures. But that latter bit is all anyone seems to talk about. It’s as though I’m not supposed to be grieving because it’s all completely normal and healthy and happy for my children, to which I say, yes, AND.… I often quip that I chose the two absolute worst professions for someone so acutely sensitive and prone to melancholy:  Both mothers and therapists, if they do their jobs well, are rewarded by being left.

When my daughter talks about art school in Edinburgh, or my son about making a movie with friends all summer, I feel joy mixed with an ache in my body, the pangs of a second sort of labor and delivery: that of releasing my children into the wide world. I am keenly, wrenchingly aware that the best chapter of my life, “Motherhood”  is over, and the next chapter (and here I must trust that there IS a next chapter) called  “Otherhood” has yet to begin. I feel the love and the grief, sitting together in my heart.

I recently received the Five of Cups in a tarot reading I did. This card pictures a cloaked figure, head hung low, in mourning. On his left, three spilled cups lie turned over on the ground. But on his right, two full cups still stand, and beyond them, a river, a bridge, a castle on a hill, and a setting—or rising—sun. This card perfectly encapsulates the experience of chapters ending and possibilities beckoning and the moment that we stand feeling grief, but also surrounded by potential.

It’s important to mourn what is gone: in fact, I believe it is essential that we grieve in order to make space for our hearts to heal. I even wrote a book about it. But it is equally important to look around, to see both what remains and what waits for us. To feel, and heal, and then to pick up our cups, look toward the light, and cross the river into new beginnings. To re-enter our lives. To begin a new chapter.

I know it’s time for me to get a life. That’s the sum and substance of it. What this new life, this time of Otherhood will look like, remains to be seen. I know what I’d LIKE it to look like, and that’s a good place to start.

I want to be brave. I want to cross that river, to explore and discover and connect. I want a peaceful mind, a joyful, grateful heart, and an open spirit. I want travel, to create, and, if I’m lucky, to fall ridiculously, ebulliently in love with someone who feeds my soul. In short, I want to do what my children are doing, just with greater groundedness and a lot more wisdom. That’s the kind of Otherhood I can get behind: the kind that makes my children proud of me. The kind that, like motherhood, surprises me with joy.