Filling Time: TwinLife Empty-Nesting

I laughed out loud – literally – at the loaf of bread sitting on the hood of my car. It was so my mom. Almost as soon as I showed up (late) at the 6:15 PM meeting for the reunion concert at my high school, she asked me if I wanted to ride with her while she drove another committee member home afterward, a trip that would have taken over an hour. I was tired, and I was honest. “No. I worked all day, hopped in the car, and haven’t eaten dinner.” She nodded in understanding.

“I bought chicken salad” (my favorite local cuisine), “and I have a loaf of gluten free bread in the car. Get it before we leave.”

Moms never stop being moms.

Without going into all the details of why I didn’t get the bread from her car as directed, after a tour of the renovated auditorium where I had performed so many times as a teen, I walked to the parking lot and burst out laughing when I saw a loaf of bread tucked into the hood of my car.

This was the start to my extra long weekend that took me the LONG way to move my son out of his college dorm. My travels began with a trip to my daughter’s college, my third time in four weeks to see her dance. This performance was the big one, a mainstage on the biggest stage on campus. As a first year student, she could only be in one number, and I lucked out – her number was first.

I say I lucked out because my second stop of the weekend was to move my son out of his dorm the morning after my daughter’s performance. Since the schools are about 5 hours apart, I decided to drive about halfway after I watched my daughter dance, spend the night on hotel points I had accumulated over the past few years, and wake at a reasonable hour to finish the drive. With her scheduled to perform first in the show, it meant I could get to sleep an hour earlier.

As I sat in the back of the audience, waiting for the curtain, I thought about the fact that my kids had finished their first year of college. It didn’t seem possible. Where had the time gone? My mind wandered between the to-do list I was mentally building for moving my son and wonderings about how the house would change (again) as the kids came home for the summer.

And then she stepped on stage, and for a few minutes, I was fully there. She was beautiful, graceful, and perfectly anchored on stage – a stage where I had once performed (though not as a dancer). Watching her do the thing she loves, in the place that is now hers, helped ground me in that moment. And then the number ended, and I slipped out the back door. I walked across the parking lot, texting her to tell her she had looked beautiful on stage, and yet I was already thinking about the next stop on my weekend trip.

The hotel where I planned to stay for the night was about three hours away, and since I was going to arrive late, I checked in on the hotel app. By the tine I arrived, my mobile key was in hand, and for the first time ever, I bypassed the front desk and went straight to the room that I was assigned in the app. When I opened the door, I realized pretty quickly something was off.

Two bedrooms. A full living room. A kitchen with a dishwasher, stove, and full fridge. It was way more than I needed for a 7-hour rest. I double checked my reservation, confirmed I hadn’t made a mistake in booking, and started to wander the space. I turned off one, then two TVs, and placed my bag in one of the bedrooms. As I picked up the remote in the second bedroom to turn off that TV, I glanced at the welcome message and startled at the screen that announced someone else’s name. I wondered if I was actually in the wrong room and if “John” would be entering sometime while I slept.

I grabbed my phone and ID and headed down to the lobby. It turns out I had been given a complimentary upgrade (they had run out of rooms), and that maintenance had probably moved a cable box from one room to another. The hotel clerk assured me that nobody else would be accessing the room, and I slogged back to go to bed.

It was strange, all that space, so I claimed one bedroom as a dressing room and the other for sleep. The next morning, I drove the rest of the way to my son’s campus, where I helped him pack up his room. As we filled bins and bags, I pushed back feelings about the process. Each item was physical evidence of a year that somehow both just started and is already over. My son said, almost offhandedly and with his sarcastic tone, “It seems like only eight months ago we were doing this.”

He was right. It did.

And it didn’t.

Because I remembered very clearly moving him in. Yet at the same time, I had no idea how we got from that moment to this one so quickly.

I spent about 24 hours with him. Not long, but enough. Enough to pack, to talk about the year gone by, and to prepare for the next step to come. He had to stay on campus for a final exam, and so my husband, who had been on a business trip and unable to make the first leg of my trip, had driven a second car to meet us for this moving out moment. We left that car for my son, and it was another small shift. It would be the first time he drove the distance from school to home, all alone, a (not so) fully grown adult doing yet another adult thing that was both completely normal and slightly disorienting.
My husband and I drove a fully packed SUV back to our home and unloaded all the bags and bins and remnants of a year gone by into our front hall. He said, almost offhandedly and with his sarcastic tone, “Thanks for bringing me all my son’s dirty clothes.”

I responded, “Yeah, somehow we brought home an SUV worth of stuff, AND we lost a car and still don’t have our kid.”

A loop in time and distance complete, I wondered what the summer would bring.