Dear Tree Guy,
I want you to know what you took from me.
We bought our first house with a toddler and an infant – had it built in Pennsylvania and driven into Maryland on trucks. It was the cheapest way we could find to buy a house we liked. We put the whole thing together with cranes like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
Our yard was a mud pit. There were no trees to climb and, as a youth, I’d spent a considerable amount of time climbing the beautiful Sycamore near my home. I’d sit in the tree and read books. So when we decided to plant a tree for our kids, we chose a Sycamore, a real Sycamore that had to be special-ordered. At a mere 7’ tall, it was planted right outside a window where I could watch it grow. We watered it meticulously for two years to produce deep, sturdy roots, so that tree would be strong enough to withstand anything.
Our kids grew and the Sycamore grew, and they were both bigger than we could have imagined after a very fast decade. The tree grew taller than our house. It had substantial, gorgeous branches that the kids could climb – and they did. The tree blocked the view of our neighbor’s house, and gave a gorgeous, natural feel to a once barren yard.
We used the tree as a feeding station to heal a group of foxes with mange. Squirrels buried their nuts under it. Migrating birds stopped by – even tiny hummingbirds. I hung a beautiful handmade hummingbird swing from a low branch. I watched the hummingbirds fly from the feeder back into that tree, marveling at their tiny size and supersonic wings.
My oldest son is in college now. Last time he came home, he climbed nearly to the top of that tree. My youngest son is now heading for college, and he’s spent time in that tree as well.
My son and I were looking at colleges when your guys came to my house to decimate my backyard. I knew you were coming. The tree in the backyard couldn’t grow sideways forever – so I knew it would be cut down, but I didn’t want to be in town when it fell. It broke my heart.
But nothing could have prepared me for what you did to the Sycamore in the front yard. One low-hanging branch of the Sycamore brushed over our cars as we pulled into our driveway – just a tiny piece of the tree, really.
But you didn’t cut one tiny piece.
You massacred my beloved Sycamore. In minutes, without asking us, you chopped off twelve feet of enormous, beautiful, low branches. You sawed off limb after limb – seven branches, at least – before my husband saw what you were doing.
The tree we planted with love and care, the one that grew up with our children, the only tree I have loved since my childhood Sycamore, was destroyed. You chopped and chopped, WITHOUT OUR PERMISSION, and then just said, “Oops.”
My kids can’t climb the tree now; you have taken away all of the lowest branches. The handmade hummingbird swing is gone; no one even noticed its glimmering beauty as it fell with the branches you sheared. The yard next door – an eyesore at best – is now clearly visible, since the tree is only half there. I just sit at the window and cry.
You took something that cannot be replaced: you took a symbol of my children’s lives, a version of my own childhood. You destroyed and obliterated the tree we used to measure the growth of our family. Just as my last child is leaving for college, you ruined my tree, just as the tree was becoming the only thing I had left to watch grow.
YOU did that. And then you destroyed our backyard. Then you left.
You can’t make this right. You can’t bring back what you stole from me and my family. You can’t make the tree climbable again – it will never, ever be climbable again. You can’t apologize to a tree, or regrow its gorgeous, beautiful limbs. You can’t, in fact, do anything to save our beloved tree.
But you could pay for us to plant a new tree.
It wouldn’t have to be a huge tree, and it won’t grow along with my children because they will be gone. It won’t give back anything to MY family. But it is something you can do to give back to Nature.
I am not the kind of person to threaten you with court or lawsuits; I am the kind of person who thinks love is always the answer. And maybe you are not that kind of person; maybe you don’t think what you did was not a big deal. But I have lost something dear, and you have been merrily going about your days, doing nothing to make amends.
So: what kind of person are you? Are you willing to help us have another tree planted? Or are you the kind of person who is all about the money and will ignore this letter?
I will wait to find out. I will just sit here, looking out my window – for the rest of my life, looking out this window – seeing what you did, and waiting.
I am swamped with college tours. My head is spinning with organizing the trips, preparing statistical paperwork, reading college books and prepping Shane for every possible collegiate option.
I love it. In fact, next to planning a Disney vacation, this is the most fun I’ve ever had.
I am a member of several online college admissions groups. When I can’t find anyone to talk to about colleges, I read. Currently I’m re-reading Colleges That Change Lives and Princeton Review’s 387 Best Colleges. Given that I devoured these books when Dylan was searching, and that some of Shane’s top choices are featured in both books, I’m actually on my third time through.
Over the summer, I devoured two phenomenal books written about the admissions process: Who Gets In and Why and Valedictorians at the Gate. I’ve requested another book through the interlibrary loan because my library doesn’t have it. It’s called The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College.
I have no interest – nor does Shane – in Ivy League colleges. It’s not his style.
But it’s not about his style. I’ve recently read books about college essays and financial aid secrets. I’ve enjoyed autobiographies by people who got through grad school debt-free, cheated their way into Harvard, and quit the admissions grind for greener pastures. I’m still debating whether or not I want to read about the celebrity admissions scandal. Some things, I may not want to know.
I spend hours preparing stat sheets for Shane for each college we visit. He likes to look at the numbers, and I like to compile them. His interests focus primarily on whether or not the average GPA of a college is too low – or too high – for his liking, and what percentage of students graduate in four years. These are important to him so I print them in a brief document as a reminder before he steps onto a campus.
I pull together student reviews for him, too, from online sites. These reviews are amazingly helpful in letting him know what life is really like at any given university. They give him clues about what to look for, and what questions to ask during his visit.
Shane has applied to 12 of his 14 chosen colleges already. He doesn’t need any of this. The visits are sufficient, maybe overkill. He’s done a zillion Zooms with all of these schools. He knows what he likes, what he doesn’t – what he wants, what he doesn’t. Shane is going to make his own choice, and he certainly hasn’t read any of the admissions books that I’ve been reading.
I’m reading them just for fun. I am obscenely fascinated by college admissions. I’m fascinated in exactly the same way I was fascinated by baby deliveries before I gave birth for the first time, when I watched a thousand episodes of A Baby Story on TLC.
Reading, studying, preparing… it makes me feel like I have control over what happens next. I don’t, of course; I’ve had no control the entire time. Shane has all the control – Shane, and God.
After a thousand episodes of A Baby Story, my own brutal, two-day delivery ended with a traumatized newborn and an emergency C-Section. My second delivery was worse. Watching that show now makes me nauseous.
We’re down to our last three college visits for the fall. In the past six weeks, we’ve toured eight schools in six states. We’ll be visiting three additional states for the last three schools. And then …
Who knows? The results are entirely out of my control.
So I am hanging onto the process with the death grip of someone who is about to lose everything.
Shane and I were having a great time on a college road trip last weekend. We were talking casually about his breakfast when Shane said “Mom” with a look of horror in his eyes.
I looked up and realized that our car had careened off the highway.
With the speed set at 75 mph, we’d been cruising in the left lane, all good. A split second later we had veered completely off the road – not a little, but all four wheels heading in an unwanted direction.
We were gliding sharply downhill at an alarmingly high rate of speed.
Grass, I thought. There shouldn’t be grass.
Then I thought only this: get the car back onto the highway.
I turned off the cruise control but never once hit the brake.
Still flying down the hill, bumping over whatever lies in a median strip on a highway, I kept a death-grip on the steering wheel. Get the car back onto the highway.
We couldn’t go uphill until we stopped going downhill. I turned the wheel slowly to the right, still bumping along at a high rate of speed, trying to position us sideways on the bank.
I remember no sound. Just: grass.
The car was completely out of control, like steering on ice. Too fast, too fast, too fast – but no brake. I needed the momentum to carry us back up the hill.
No gas, either: I didn’t want to get stuck in mud.
Get the car back onto the highway.
The car swerved – sideways – downhill – grass – like ice – uphill – grass – sideways – it felt like we were spinning…. Get the car back onto the highway. We’d been on the hill for 10 minutes, 10 hours maybe, 10 seconds – who knew? – with me pulling at the steering wheel, aiming to get back onto the black – seeing only green – time demolished by the feeling of being utterly out of control.
We were facing diagonally uphill, the back wheels still skidding, trying to grab hold, when I saw it: the highway was within reach.
I couldn’t see what was at the top of the hill, but I saw something that wasn’t grass. My goal was in sight.
And that’s when I realized with horror: we are pulling onto an active highway.
If I could get us out of this grass – and it seemed suddenly like I might – we’d be in even more danger. With the car barely able to climb the lip of the asphalt, I didn’t have even an instant to turn my head and check for traffic. I was pulling the car directly into the path of whatever was up there.
And my baby was sitting helplessly in the passenger seat.
Please God, I thought, without any time to finish my prayer.
The car clonked up onto the asphalt, out of the grass – one wheel, two, then four.
Nothing hit us.
I checked my speed: 38 mph. We’d slowed down considerably, and now we needed to speed up to avoid getting hit by oncoming cars. Tentatively, I pushed on the gas pedal.
“Are you okay?” I breathed at Shane.
“Okay?” he asked, incredulous.
“Are you okay?” I asked again, begging.
“Physically, I guess.”
Just after we reemerged on the highway, while I was still shaking, a sign announced an upcoming rest area. Five miles later, we pulled off to check the car’s status.
It wasn’t clean. We lost a small piece of trim from one door and there was a dent that I found hours later. The wheels and the undercarriage were caked in sod. We rescued a lone grasshopper who sat baffled next to one tire. With the exception of a four-inch chunk of wood stuck between one tire and its hubcap, everything was copacetic.
Thanking God at this point seems necessary – but entirely insufficient. It was a miracle.
Yesterday morning, I woke up and got ready for softball.
I heard a fan making its soft whooshing sound down the hall, which was unusual. Bill has a fan in his bedroom, but that fan is usually off by 8 a.m. (We sleep in separate rooms so as not to kill one another.)
In fact, usually by the time I’m ready for softball, Shane is at school and Bill is at work. So I figured the fan was left on accidentally – until I saw the darkness in Bill’s room.
And the fan was still on. What the … ?
It was way too late for Bill to be sleeping. He never missed work. Bill is rarely sick, and even when he is, he goes to work. If he’d had some kind of appointment, he’d surely have told me.
So why is his room still dark?
In our dating days, Bill often forgot to open the curtains. Tentatively, I looked inside. I expected him to be gone. I peered into the darkness, aiming my gaze at his bed.
Lumps.
I saw lumps in his bed – pillows, blankets, maybe a human form. Yes, definitely a human form. This could mean only one thing.
Bill is dead.
I walked into the room, unsure what to do. He had to be breathing. He simply had to be breathing. He wasn’t even sick last night.
His heart. Bill has a small arrhythmia.
I stared down at the lump that was a human form, waiting for my eyes to adjust.
Bill was lying on his side, the top of his head barely visible above the covers.
He wasn’t snoring. He wasn’t even moving. I expected his body to slowly lift and fall, but there was no movement, and no sound.
I stared and listened for a long time.
Nothing.
Finally I put my hand just below his shoulder on his back, where I thought I might be able to detect lung action. I expected him to leap up at my touch if he was alive, but … still nothing.
I left my hand there. I waited. I felt no movement, no breath. I started to panic.
What should I do? He’s really not breathing. What do I do if he’s dead?
I considered calling someone. I watched enough TV to know that you’re supposed to call someone.
Who? I thought. Who am I supposed to call? An ambulance? A mortuary? A priest?
I couldn’t remember.
I just stood there in the dark, my hand resting on his back, still waiting for breath.
That’s when Bill casually rolled over and said “what’s up?” without a hint of concern for his own life.
“You’re not dead,” I said. I wanted to cry with joy! Instead, I suddenly realized – with all the force of a Mack truck – that it was a federal holiday. I’d just awakened Bill on the one day he could have slept in.
I removed my hand and stepped away from the bed. “I forgot that it was a holiday!” I called as I left. “Go back to sleep!”
I shuffled out way faster than I came in, relieved but sorry that I’d woken him, trying not to think about a day when I might actually find him there not breathing.
For the first time since I’d walked into his room, I realized I could breathe, too.
I love him so much.
Ten hours later, having forgotten all about Bill’s brush with death, I griped endlessly that he hadn’t correctly cooked my gluten-free tuna casserole.
You’d think a scare like that would last a little longer.
Sometimes I still think about my former “best friend.” Nearly a decade ago, and without provocation, she slammed me on Facebook and deleted me from her life.
I didn’t realize, in college, that she was a narcissist. I thought she was cool. Looking back, I see (now) that she had no ability to care about other people. But at the time, I was totally enraptured by her taste in music.
For a long time after the Facebook incident, I had a hard time listening to songs that reminded me of Bonnie. I would feel hurt and sad and eject the jukebox record or change the channel. But over the years I realized: what I liked best about Bonnie was, in actuality, the music we shared. My love was for the music, not the person.
I am incredibly sensitive to the lure of music because it helps me connect to people.
But I also love learning all about the songs I like: who sings it? what’s the official title? is it on the charts – and what number? what are the lyrics? who wrote it? who’s in the band? how old are they? what do they look like? is there a video? did the song win any awards?
This started when I was very young, and I liked a lot of songs. So I have a ridiculous amount of useless musical knowledge in my head. (I store it in the place where other people store their useful knowledge.)
So when Bonnie came along, and she introduced me to whole albums and bands that weren’t on the radio, I was awestruck. The music was called “new wave.” Now, the wave is old and tired. But at the time, it was glorious.
Bonnie would pull out album after album, playing song after song: Yaz, The Smiths, Talking Heads, The Cure, U2. We discovered Howard Jones, XTC, Depeche Mode, Prefab Sprout and INXS. So many bands were new when I was young! We drank – a lot – and we listened to music.
Music took on a whole new meaning for me. I listened harder after she pointed out a song’s nuances. But Bonnie was reckless – dancing madly on her bed, tossing albums like frisbees across her room. I was always a little bothered by the broken albums. I sincerely treasured the music.
And emotionally, I attached Bonnie to the music. This connection survived well past its expiration. I couldn’t think about certain songs without thinking about her. I’d spent years believing I loved a person just because I loved the music. But Bonnie isn’t a music guru, and she doesn’t own the songs we enjoyed together.
So now I turn on my jukebox filled with my favorite songs, and I play whatever I want. My musical tastes have expanded over the years, so I can play the old bands but new genres, new experiences, and new music has broadened my horizons. I have new emotional attachments, new favorite bands, and a new soundtrack to my life.
It makes me happy to think of this: the soundtrack of my life. It’s mine and mine alone, and I can love it every moment of every day. It’s an absolutely beautiful thing.
I try to be helpful. I think I am being helpful. I often believe that my helpfulness will actually help.
But I have learned that this is not true. I am not helpful. Somehow my attempts are misconstrued as being a royal pain.
I’m not sure how this happens. I have spent the vast majority of my life trying to do what’s right. I think that other people want to know what’s right, too. But they don’t. They want to do whatever they’re doing, and they want me to shut up about it.
I am now 57 years old. When, exactly, will I learn to shut up?
My problem is two-fold: (1) In my youth, I never stood up for myself until I became a belligerent drunk, and (2) I always believe that it’s a good idea to tell people what is right.
So it’s tough to keep my mouth shut – or stop my fingers, since I am usually typing these “helpful” ideas on email, social media, or some other form of written communication. Ironically, I type because I want to make sure what I’m saying is kind – and it’s still misconstrued.
This recent misconstruction happened when my county’s Facebook page reported the weekly high school football scores. Someone read the scores and correctly pointed out, “Urbana isn’t even in our county!”
I noticed that this was correct, and jumped on the post to mention that Shane’s high school scores were not included. I said – and I quote:
“I don’t know about Urbana, but I am pretty sure ROCKVILLE is part of Montgomery County, and their scores aren’t here.”
Rockville is the literal heart of the county, the home of the county government buildings.
Three people verbally beat me to a pulp – after completely ignoring the person who complained about Urbana. “This isn’t ESPN,” they said. “Go get your scores somewhere else!”
This was not the reaction I expected.
So when the page administrator said that the scores were randomly sent in by people at the game, I suggested:
“Maybe if you aren’t reporting the scores by calling and getting verified information, you shouldn’t be reporting the scores.”
And this was taken wrong, too.
But what if, for example, some yahoo reported a score as 27-6 in favor of his own team, when that team had been crushed 54-3? That seems likely, especially in the area of high school football, I thought the website would want to avoid that.
So I went to bed, thinking I had helped.
But when I awoke, I’d been blasted again.
“You insulted the website!”
“You could volunteer to do research for them instead of complaining.”
So, as usual, I apologized profusely for saying something that I’d intended to be helpful.
“Sometimes comments are misread, and I am really getting that feeling here. I wasn’t complaining or insulting anyone, nor do I even care about the scores. I was just making a suggestion: if they don’t verify the scores, maybe they shouldn’t be reporting them. That was it. End of story. No complaints. No insults. No arguing. I was just making a suggestion. Obviously this is not a suggestion that anyone wanted to hear…. I am sorry that my response somehow offended everyone. It was never my intent. This is why I almost never put anything on this site. My ‘helpfulness’ is often misconstrued by strangers. Apologies everywhere.”
I’m starting to believe it’s the way I word things, more so than who I am, that makes people find me off-putting. In a way, this is good. The wording of my statements should be fixable.
I’m just not sure that I can do it any better.
It doesn’t feel fixable. It feels like I’m just being me, and I’m being judged and stomped upon for it. And to be honest, I am getting really tired of being judged and stomped upon. It’s been 57 years.
Being misunderstood totally sucks.
Shane is a senior in high school and we are in the midst of college visit season. He’s filled out the vast majority of his applications already, but because of the pandemic he’s visited a lot of empty campuses. The current season gives him a chance to make up for lost time.
Fortunately, because his mother is insane, Shane has been looking at colleges since he was in 7th grade – and more seriously since his freshman year of high school. So he is waaaaay ahead of his peers with regard to visits.
This means that we were fairly focused on which campuses to visit this fall. He’s already looked at two local colleges, one in Ohio and two in New York. This coming weekend, he was scheduled to look at one in Virginia – again – but the college was considering canceling the Open House.
“I think I’ve seen that college enough,” Shane said.
“So you don’t want to go back?” I asked.
“Not really,” he said.
Discussing it a bit more, he reminded me that he had already visited informally once – during a pre-pandemic evening, when Shane played ping pong with his grandfather in the campus game room.
Over the course of several months, Shane did a number of Zoom sessions with the college.
As soon as in-person tours opened up, we traveled to Virginia and Shane did a mid-pandemic tour of a mostly empty campus. He had a one-on-one visit with a student and a conversation with his admissions officer.
Last week, Shane met with that same admissions counselor when she visited his high school. Shane has even already applied to the college. There just isn’t that much more he needs to do.
With all this in mind, we decided to forego the trip this weekend – leaving Shane with a wide-open weekend for the first time in almost a month.
We have additional trips, and more colleges, scheduled. We are looking forward to Open Houses and tours. We are thrilled that – even though we are all masked indoors – we get a chance to wander on campuses that last year forced us to drive through with our windows closed.
Half the fun for me, though, is planning the trips. I am a little nuts that way. I have been planning college road trips since Dylan was in eighth grade – seven years ago.
A few days ago I planned a trip for my friend and her son, even though they didn’t ask me to do so – and they certainly didn’t want my advice or a full trip schedule. It’s just that I love planning the trips so much, I couldn’t control myself. I planned a whole two-day trip (with a possible third-day extension) including tours, open houses, and drive-through visits … all for someone else’s son.
In other words, I am really enjoying the planning – but I am just as happy that we’re doing nothing this weekend, even though I planned the whole trip. I’m almost as happy canceling the trip as I was when I originally planned it!
What does that say about me?
I wonder.
(… continued from previous post)
“I ran over a deer,” Shane said, shaken. “It was already dead but I ran over it.”
He didn’t realize it was a deer until he was nearly on top of it, and there was an 18-wheeler in the other lane; he’d had no choice but to go over it.
And now the car was making a squealing sound that it hadn’t been making before: a loud, horrific, rumbling, squealing sound.
Shane pulled onto the shoulder of the highway. We looked at the car: no visible damage. The tires were good (valve stems intact). On my belly I stared unbelieving under the car.
Nothing appeared to be wrong.
We squealed our way to a wider shoulder. We Facetimed Bill and looked under the car “together” – nothing. Blinkers flashing, going 20 in a 70 zone, we squealed a dozen miles to a gas station.
“Everyplace around here closes at 4:30,” said the woman working at Sheetz.
It was 4:35. On a Saturday. Nothing would be open on Sunday.
We called AAA, who recommended that we make a police report.
“Why?”
“Don’t you have front-end damage?”
“It doesn’t look like we have any damage,” I said. “We just want someone to tell us what’s making that sound!”
“We can only tow you to the nearest service station,” he said. “There’s one two miles away that’s open until 7:00.”
We could squeal another two miles. (So much for $$$ AAA.)
We finally arrived at an open service station.
“It’s gonna be awhile,” said the car guy. “We’ve got three cars in front of you.”
Bill had already searched for a hotel in the area; the entire (tiny) town was booked for the night.
“We’re probably going to be here for a week,” I told him. “Take your time.”
“Nah, we’ll get you in today,” he said.
Well, that was good news. Shane and I sat in the car and waited. And waited. And waited. Almost two hours later, the man took our car into the garage.
We decided to hang out at Dunkin’ Donuts across the street – but by the time Shane got a donut and coffee, they were done with our car.
“Oh no,” I said to Shane. “I forgot to tell him about the ants!” They were still swarming all over our car, and I was afraid he’d determined that the two issues were related – or worse, he refused to work on the car when he saw all the ants.
We raced back across the street from the donut shop. Our car was sitting, untouched. I looked around for the car guy who eventually reappeared.
“You’re all set!” he said.
I stared, dumbfounded. “I’m all set?” I repeated, confused.
“Yep, you’re ready to go!”
“What happened?”
“The bracket around the drive shift was pushed in,” he said. “When he hit the deer, he must have hit the bracket right in the center and knocked it in.”
He made a “popping” sound and demonstrated, his two hands smacking into each other.
“That was it?”
“Yep. I just popped it out for ya,” he said. “You’re good to go.”
Like the tire guy, he would not accept payment for such a simple repair. But that man saved us days of aggravation and rescued our trip. We arrived home at nearly midnight and plopped into bed.
And that’s when Bill went to work on the ant problem.
Three blocks of poison and 24 hours later, Bill had removed two nesting colonies of ants from inside my car.
Now we’re ready for the next college road trip.
This weekend was an adventure. It was supposed to be just another college road trip; instead, it was an adventure.
We were ready to leave right after Shane finished school – and surprisingly, got into the car on time. We turned on the engine to back out of the driveway.
“Oh!” I exclaimed, grabbing a napkin, “There’s a spider in here!” I let the spider crawl from the radio onto a napkin, then handed the napkin to Shane. He hopped out of the car and put it in the grass.
“It wasn’t a spider,” he said as he got back into the car. “It was an ant.” As he said it, another ant surfaced through a crack in the dashboard. We set it outside, too, but where there are two ants, there are usually a hundred.
We tried to leave, but the ants kept coming. We only got to the end of our street before we drove back home. We told Bill about our issue. While he was taking apart the glove compartment, I found a long trail running outside of the car, near the engine. Bill grabbed the hose and tried to guarantee that we could drive ant-free to New York. Somehow the ants transitioned during the two-night trip and by the time we got home, they were swarming at the back of the car. The hose accomplished very little.
Meanwhile, we drove: seven hours to the first college, two hours to the next college, and six hours home.
During the first leg, I ran over some huge chunks of glass so I decided to check our tire pressure. One of our tires was twelve pounds low! We filled it up and tried to find somewhere to patch it – which was not an easy task. The gas station had no garage and sent us to a tire place.
“We’re going to need the car for the whole day,” said the tire shop concierge.
“I need to be in Rochester in two hours,” I said. Shane was touring the University of Rochester.
“That’s the best I can do,” he said. “You can try the tire center down the street, but they’re booking two weeks out.”
He begrudgingly mentioned a third shop half a mile away, but they were busy, too. “It’s only me and one other guy,” said the new tire guy. “It’ll be at least a couple of hours before I can look at it.”
I told him where we needed to be and he said, “That’s like five minutes from here!” And sure enough, we could have almost walked to our tour from the shop. So we drove into Rochester, found a better tire shop (thanks to Bill, who was researching from Maryland), and they took us in immediately.
We waited about half an hour, then our car was pulled in – and back out – in mere minutes.
“The valve stem was pushed in,” said our new best friend, Ray. “They pulled it out so you should be fine now.”
No charge. Off we went, just in time for our college tour.
We spent the night near Ithaca College, and thoroughly enjoyed their Open House the next day. We had no more tire problems, and the ants weren’t bothering us much.
After the Open House, we hit the road. I drove for about an hour, then asked Shane to drive. Almost instantly, I fell asleep – the night before had been rough, and I hadn’t gotten much sleep.
Suddenly a loud thwunk woke me; I sat up quick.
Panicked, I asked Shane: “What happened?!”
(to be continued….)
Shane has temporarily moved into our basement.
It’s a one-bedroom apartment with full kitchen, living and dining areas, a separate bedroom and bath, and even a washer/dryer – which he is putting to good use after only a couple of days down there. He uses the separate entrance and drives his car to school. He goes out without telling me where or why – although he always mentions “I might be going out” which is kind of him.
Shane is almost 18, and this is a good way for him to see what it’s like living on his own. Next year at this time, he is likely to be hundreds (hopefully not thousands) of miles away in college. I thought it would help him learn what he’ll need next year, what he doesn’t yet know.
But I am the one who is learning.
I am learning that it is lonely here without him. When he comes home, he doesn’t come in and pet the dog, smile at me, tell me about his day. He just goes into his apartment and I hear nothing. Instead of longingly waiting until 2:45 p.m. when he gets home, I find myself longingly waiting … and then realizing that I have nothing to anticipate.
Dylan has been gone for two years, and Shane has been – especially because of the pandemic – texting friends, creating an online presence, getting to know people via his phone. I rarely see him. But he’s been here. Sure, he’s upstairs in a closed room, making no known noise. But once in awhile, he comes downstairs to visit the dog and say hello.
Now he’s not even here.
I wake up and think: Why should I bother getting out of bed?
My first thought – because I love it so much – is that I can work on planning our college road trips. This is not actually an activity, but I can spend days, weeks, even months planning a three-day trip to see a college. My boys – each! – have been forced to look at nearly a hundred colleges because I want to make sure they have all of their available options. And also, I just love to plan trips.
But every morning now, I wonder: what am I going to do next year at this time?
In far fewer than 365 days, Shane will be finished with college applications. He will have chosen where he’s going to be educated, and we’ll all be excited for him, wherever he decides to go.
In 365 days, we will have finished our European vacation (planned during the pandemic). We will have purchased everything we think he needs for college, and tearfully dropped him off at his freshman dorm, wherever it may be.
A year from now, then, there will be no college road trips to plan. There will be no pitter-patter of teenage footsteps clomping through the house. There will be no guitars or pianos playing in any area of the house. In fact, like it is now, it will be dead silent.
And I will be … doing what? What will I be doing? What will be my purpose for getting out of the bed in a year?
It’s impossible to guess what purpose I will ever have beyond being a mom. My parents tell me that’s when it’s time to wait for grandchildren, but I was 40 years old when I had Shane. I’m not a hundred percent sure I’ll be alive when – or if – those grandchildren are born.
Of course, I’m not a hundred percent sure I’ll be alive in a year.
So … I am going to do what I can today to enjoy it. I will watch Shane driving by on his way to Starbucks or Taco Bell or his friend’s house – wherever he is going – and I will try to memorize his image, his movements, his voice … whenever he’s around.
And I’ll try desperately hard not to think too much about next year.
