CONFESSION

I low-key miss my kids so much.

I miss having them at home, where I know where they are, where I know they are safe. I miss having them here where I can enjoy their humor and their conversation and their presence. I miss Karin’s casual physical affection and Martin’s sharp-eyed commentary. I miss watching shows with them and movies, and playing games with them, and going for walks with them, and just, you know, hanging out with them.

I can’t tell them this, at least not without joking about it, because I think they’d think it was something I was holding over their heads, as if my missing them was a threat (it’s not) and a wish (it is) and a veiled obligation (it’s not) and an embarrassing yearning (it is). Plus they’d probably hurt themselves from rolling their eyes so hard.

Did I not appreciate the long years when I had them home? No. I did and I didn’t, mostly because when you’re in it, you don’t think about the fact that it will end. That one day you won’t see them every day, won’t wake them up in the morning so they won’t be late for school, won’t nag them to clean their rooms, won’t go in to give them a kiss goodnight. One day you will have picked them up and sat them on your hip for the last time and you won’t even realize it. One day, after they move away, and have moved back, and moved away again, they won’t move back. Their rooms will sit empty and clean, and gradually accumulate detritus and jetsam, things thrown overboard, things that you don’t have a place for elsewhere. Their rooms become guest rooms or craft rooms or workrooms or junk rooms. And they’ll eventually, despite the names still nailed in wooden letters to the doors, stop being their rooms. Their clothes will be gone (though not Karin’s shoes, because there will always be Karin’s shoes somewhere in this house, until the day we move, or die), their art will be gone, their furniture, and their stuff: gone. Oh, maybe some of their stuff that is technically their stuff, but which they don’t really feel attached to, will still be here, but it won’t be their stuff really, not anymore. The label of “your stuff” will be yours, not theirs.

You’ll move your craft table into your son’s room, and your husband will move his bicycle on its indoor stand into your daughter’s room, and even if they come home, they will balk at spending the night, and prefer to “go home”, as if they have a home elsewhere, as if, out from under your hungry parental eyes.

My kids are always (I think) happy to see me, to see us, and they’re happy to come home and be petted and spoiled and fed. They’re happy to hang out (for a while) and have dinner, and help out with any particular need for help we might have. That makes me happy, and it makes me happy when Karin texts me when it’s been many days, even a week or two, to say she misses me, misses us, and we can make plans to get together. It makes me happy when Martin calls to talk or tell me about something that has happened that he knows will make me laugh or sympathize. It makes me happy when they want to join in on activities I am planning that I think they’d be interested in.

But it’s not the same. They’re not here. It would be weird if they were. At the ages they are, it would be weird if they hadn’t moved out, if they weren’t starting their own lives, in their own spaces, with their own stuff and their days full of their own schedules and jobs and school and friends and plans. Wouldn’t it? It would have been weird for me back when I was their age. I couldn’t have fathomed moving back into my parents’ home when I was a young adult, unless I absolutely had to. Not because I didn’t love them, but because I was busy with my own blossoming life and learning how to live it without any hindrances or judgements or other’s eyes or opinions. I had things to do and places to go and people to meet. I didn’t have time for the ones that had always been there, that would always be there, that were part of my past and even if part of my present, part of my removed present, not my immediate present.

So, I get it. But I miss them even so. And I’m sure that if they WERE here, full-time, I’d probably, eventually, feel crowded or cramped, or aggravated about some thing that someone did or didn’t do. Parental in a bad way because it would be too easy to fall back into outdated roles and behave as if they were still children, as if it was still a time when they were learning how to be (how to behave and how to become and how to believe and how to begin and how to belong) and not a time when they have already fulfilled all my wildest parental-heart dreams and turned out to be the kind of people that I really want to hang out with and not just people who have to be told more than once to put their clothes away.

My mom has moved in with my sister, and I know that they are both struggling with that too-easy issue of returning to familiar yet ill-fitting roles that chafe as well as role reversals. It’s not quite the same thing as having a child move back in with you, but I’m sure it feels quite like it, for both of them, in some ways.

Both of my children (and my husband) have allowed me to see where they are via the Find My iPhone app, and I doubt any of them understand how comforting I find it to be able to see at a glance that Martin is at work, and Karin is in Stockholm for the weekend and my husband is nearly home in time for dinner. Just knowing where they are goes a long way toward soothing the absence and alleviating my need to gather my chicks.

But still, low-key, I am nearly always missing them when they’re not here.

Don’t tell them.

Mood: nostalgic
Music: After—300 Dreams