Filling Time: TwinLife Empty-Nesting

Time is a strange thing.

My husband and I started the week watching Dark, which is about more than just time travel. It’s about how time can be on a loop and how what is meant to happen happens, regardless of how you might try to change the past.

Later in the week I travelled (again) to my daughter’s dance performance. We had lunch and wandered the quad, abloom with the cherry blossoms that made every spring at my alma mater magical. In that moment, I wandered the campus with knowledge; she owned it.

That night I was able to see her do hip hop for the first time in a while. Watching her, I was aware of the versions of her I’d seen before, layered into the dancer in front of me at that moment – she was the same and somehow so much different, more mature.

While I was there, I met with one of the first professors I had in college. Thirty years ago I sat in his lecture hall, and on Friday, I shared a coffee with him. I did my first mini-research study in the social sciences in his small group breakout back then. Now, we chatted about the state of higher education and commiserated about being faculty members at liberal arts colleges. Sitting with him,I viscerally recalled being his student, and in some ways, no time had passed. And at the same time, everything had changed. We had become colleagues – sharing our expertise, pushing each other’s thinking, swearing (literally) at the state of the world.

Past and present sat right there together.

We ended the weekend bowling with friends we haven’t seen in a very long time. We’ve known them since our younger years, before kids. It felt familiar, but also somehow different. It was like stepping back into something that had been waiting for us but that fit in a new way. We laughed. We ate. We shared stories. And we made plans for how we might fill time together moving forward.

After bowling and dinner, we headed back to relax in front of the TV – this time in our separate domains, watching our individual guilty pleasures. I chatted with my kids about our weekend, and they wondered which aliens had replaced their anti-social parents who had suddenly had three social outings in ten days. Scrolling through the DVR while we talked, I saw that The Way Home had started its new season. A fitting end to the week, I turned it on, watching a show about time travel that underscored my feelings that time was both strange and inevitable.

In just two weeks, my kids will be coming home after finishing their first year of college. I don’t know where the time went. I’m not sure how I filled it (though I have many weeks of blogs to remind me). I’m beginning to realize that time is both moving forward and looking back. It’s looping and collapsing. It’s returning me to people and places and versions of myself that I thought were in the past.

Time is, indeed, a strange thing.