Oct
2
Last week we dropped Riley off for college, which both was and was not as bad as I’d thought it might be. It was bolstering to see all the other parents there to help, dragging giant carts through hallways and heaving big clunky duffel bags and sweating their way up the stairs. Everyone had the same complicated expression, everyone was there to do what they could to ease the transition and then say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. It was good to see how organized the university staff was, with legitimately helpful students posted everywhere to provide directions and instructions and be on the proactive lookout for confusion. It was weirdly nice to see Riley’s name on a little bag hung on his door and inside the little bag was, in addition to Useful Paperwork, a toothbrush and toothpaste.
It was also very hard to do the last embrace and feel how we were both lingering, not wanting to let go. It was hard to smile and say I love you and you’re going to do great! instead of Wow this is terrible and I can’t believe it’s happening! It was hard to actually leave the building without him and get in the truck without him and then leave the city without him and then drive two hours south and go into our house where he is visibly not there, where his not-thereness is a thing that is less of an absence and more of a presence, a dotted-line ghost that I cannot touch or be comfortingly annoyed by or hug goodnight.
It has been a real MIXED BAG. It reminds me of early parenthood in so many ways, where both things can be true at the same time. I love this newborn beyond all reason AND I have, ha ha, completely napalmed my life! I am swimming in a sea of awe and wonder AND drowning in a pool of bone-melting anxiety! I am constantly thrilled beyond measure AND I am so incredibly bored I could barf!
Except now it is: I am so proud and he is exactly where he should be AND it feels like some critical part of me has been painfully dug out with a garden trowel. I wish he could have lived with us forever AND I am so glad to no longer be picking up his messes all day long. I feel the ache of not being able to see his face AND I feel a new peacefulness in the household. I’m so happy that he is off living his own life AND I can’t believe he’s gone, I can’t believe he’s gone.
So many of us fledgling parents are grappling with the impossibility of time and it just doesn’t emotionally compute, the truth of tiny babies turning into giant young adults. It’s why we say things like “It all went by so fast!” even though in the moment, in the years themselves, it did not. We want to bring the past back to us (selectively, of course) but we can’t and there is a part of this that feels unfair, like wait wait wait, what do you MEAN all those younger versions are only memories now and I will never get to experience them again like that EVER? What do you mean I bent my entire life around parenthood like a climbing vine and now they are LEAVING?
Well. There are other, better perspectives, of course, like the anticipation of all the future versions of them, too, and the truth that parenthood does not end, it goes on and on in all its different iterations and there are so many good moments that are yet to come — including, hopefully, a new and rewarding chapter of my own life. And tell me this, when did parenthood ever feel painless? It has been my greatest and most meaningful life’s gift, it has always been a doubt-filled and bittersweet mixed bag.
Sep
1
I bought sliced turkey deli meat the other day and then a few days later read about how nine (!!) people have died from eating listeria-laden deli meat from Boar’s Head. I went and peered at my own paper-wrapped bundle: sure enough, Boar’s Head on the label, along with the price which was frankly astronomical for a mere half-pound of limp beige flaps. Surely they have recalled the meat in question and THIS turkey has been given the all clear, I thought, before hurling the package into the trash, because I’ll be goddamned if overpriced turkey meat is what takes me out. I prefer to die from a far more likely source, anyway: choking on a half-sucked Werther’s while laughing at something stupid I saw on TikTok.
:::
John and I went to Cannon Beach recently and the first night was so calm and cool; the sunset was like a dollop of orange-red paint spread across the sky. Nearly everyone was taking photos, one after another. We all wanted to keep the moment in our pockets. People huddled around little fires that glowed as the night came on. The seagulls were absolute menaces and continually tore into carefully-packed beach bags whenever someone’s back was turned, which gave a comical element to the whole picture-perfect evening. Ah, there’s a lovely couple in striking silhouette against Haystack Rock, and there goes a screeching gull with half a wheel of their brie speared on its beak.
:::
When I was a child I was diagnosed with a bicuspid aortic valve, which was initially treated with great respect (rounds of antibiotics before any dental procedure, ongoing gooey-stickered heart scans) and then fully ignored as I sailed off into adulthood. Once I turned 50 I figured it was time to check in with a cardiac specialist and so I recently saw one. He was disarmingly young and lean (I strongly recommend the Mediterranean diet, he told me, and also wrote in my notes; I pictured him at home having small portions of fish grilled with olive oil and never once housing an entire box of Deli Rye Triscuits) and efficiently sent me off for an echocardiogram right after our visit. Later, someone called me and said guess what, you don’t have a bicuspid aortic valve after all, you have a leaky mitral valve. They were largely unconcerned about this since it’s apparently been leaky all my life, long enough for heart-valve-diagnosing technology to leap forward and offer a far more accurate view of things.
I had a strange sort of reassessment of self after hearing this news: you’re not THIS, you’re THAT. Neither one being all that scary or bad except maybe it’ll get worse? Or maybe it won’t, who can say but the gods of widowmakers and listeria and car wrecks and cancer and windpipe-clogging butter rum candies. But also: it feels so right? I have always suspected that I have a tender, leaking heart.
:::
We’ve got an ongoing heat wave happening here in Eugene and I’d like to speak with the manager of late summer about it because I had just peeled away the unattractive aluminum foil I’d taped over the windows of my studio thinking that crisp apple-scented fall temperatures were on the way. This is the first summer I can remember feeling like it’s overstayed its welcome, maybe because the broiling highs started early this year and have hung around for days/weeks at a time, unusual for the PacNW. I look forward to switching up my complaining as the days get painfully short and the grey skies settle in and I trade the discomfort of constant boob sweat for long-pants waistbands.
We have, at least so far, escaped the worst of the wildfire smoke, which has become a depressingly routine summer experience. I’ll never forget the toxic Mars-like red haze that settled in for a long terrible week in 2020, just about when it felt like everything everywhere was literally and/or figuratively on fire. It was almost too on the nose. Jeez, I’d think, peering outside each day and making my mouth into a sad little flat line, we GET it already.
:::
Riley just turned nineteen! And he’s leaving for college later this month! I don’t know what to say about the passing of parenting time except that it both does and does not feel real that it has been nineteen years. It does and does not feel real that he is heading off to live on his own. It all flew by so quickly, just like everyone said, but that’s only when you’re looking in the rearview. We lived every bit of those nineteen years together, so many great times and fun times and boring times and hard times and just times, just time, and that was right and good and so too is this next stage. We took so many pictures along the way to try and stay the moment, a million spectacular sunsets of our growing boy Riley, but everything goes forward forever and that can be a real heartbreak and it can also be the greatest most heart-leakiest gift.
-
My product review site:
[