I am sitting in my daughter’s strangely quiet room. It looks mostly the same, the sheets freshly rumpled and the calendar still filled with the month’s upcoming activities. Only the closet hints at what has happened, the massive shift that has taken place.
Hangers sit empty, the full-to-bursting rods and bins mostly cleared of their occupants. Only a few items remain, still and silent and left behind.
There is an ache, a pressure in my chest as I contemplate these clothes. I, too, am left behind, no longer the right fit for this new season in her life. Waiting in what was once her room and remembering the person, that child she once was as the space she used to occupy in my arms now sits empty.
This is all complicated by the fact that I was originally planning on going with her, taking these first few steps into her new life right alongside her. It was going to be an entire weekend of lunches together and moving her into the dorms. But instead I became ridiculously sick shortly before our trip. When there was less than 48 hours left before our flights and I still could barely get out of bed, the decision was made to send her with my husband instead.
It is not a complete loss. I will fly out next week when I will hopefully have fully recovered and spend a few short days with her, cramming in what time we can have together between orientations and events. Not what I had hoped for. Not what I had planned. But still something that means this morning’s goodbye isn’t quite so final.
But I am still alone in a house that seems emptier than it ever has before. Looking forward to a life that is fundamentally different than it was yesterday.
She is my oldest, the one who made me a mother. I remember holding her in the hospital room, gazing down at her tiny face and telling her how brave she was to be my first child because I had no idea what I was doing. I loved her fiercely, and she became my world. I can count on one hand the number of trips I have taken without her, choosing instead to experience almost everything with my children as I could not imagine anything worth having that wasn’t made better by them having it too.
But while I still remember all those early years when she was in my lap, by my side, or peeking in the bathroom door, they are all a haze to her. Her memories gather in number at roughly the same pace as her social life outside the family expanded. This is the natural next step for her, and more of her memories of these last almost 19 years will fade as she grows her life well beyond the shadow of our home.
This is right, and this is good. This is what I have been working towards during all that time of teaching her, loving her, and helping her develop the strength and tools she would need to be able to navigate life on her own.
But I have not yet figured out how to temper the pain of separation or quiet the refrain of “but I was supposed to go with her” that threatens to crush me on this quiet morning. How to not feel that next week I will be a visitor to her new life instead of someone who helped her create it.
As the passing of time softens my vision, perhaps I will be able to look back and see that all the important things happened as they should and draw enough comfort from it that I am able to let go of the empty promise of what might have been. But I am devastatingly certain that my heart will always reach for her the way she used to reach for me, and that closing the closet door will not truly hide the empty space in our home that is waiting for her return.
