As Kids Pull Away at Graduation, What Does Mom Do Now?

Mom on the Run

By LIANNE WILKENS

The party is in full swing. Well, full swing for a bunch of 40-something parents. We don’t get that rowdy, really. Ever. Larry and Christy are telling stories – they’ve always got the best stories – as Pam and Bill and Pam and Marcia and Neil and Laura and my husband and I laugh and chime in with our own tales.

We’re in the kitchen, of course, the heart and soul of any house and, therefore, ground zero for the party. There on the island, a big huge cake, “Congratulations Graduate” piped across the top.

Kids are coming and going, beelining from the front door through the kitchen and out the back door. There are a couple of grown-ups out back, too, but by and large we have segregated by age, naturally and comfortably.

This is my last scheduled graduation party, of my last scheduled high school graduation. In a mere eight days my son will walk across the stage, and my life will change irrevocably. Again. Kids do that to a life.

I am, I tell my friends all the time, extremely nervous about life without kids. Yes, my son has become almost completely independent, and is hardly ever home, and yes, the house is full of friction with a 21-year-old and an 18-year-old pulling away and two parents not quite ready to let them. But still, life without kids? How does that work?

“Oh, don’t worry,” my older, one-step-ahead friends keep reassuring me. With a knowing little smile and almost a wink, “You’ll adapt quickly!,” they have each said. Every single one of them. “You get to do what YOU want to do again!” Chuckle, chuckle.

But here’s the thing: I have no idea anymore what it is I like to do! For 21 and a half years I have been dedicated to taking care of younger people. For 18 years I have been focused on their activities – sports practices and games and meets, rehearsals and concerts and recitals, den meetings and camping trips and sewing on patches. For 15 years I have been managing school – projects and homework and forms and field trips. It’s been a whirlwind two decades of doctors, dentists, orthodontists; play dates, sleepovers, friends’ tiffs; outgrown clothes and new bikes and haircuts.

And now it is over. Since 1991 I have been racing, calendar in hand, through days that seemed endless, except when they seemed to be over in a snap. I’ve felt like people have been pulling on me for years, little hands out, “Mom! Mom!”, always needing something. Always needing me. It was exhausting, and so often I counted the days until I got to just be me again. Not Mom, just me.

So how is it that this has snuck up on me? How is it that I’m inadequately prepared, and not at all grateful? What am I supposed to do now? I have hardly read a full book in years. My counted-cross-stitch supplies are covered in dust and scattered, having been scavenged for “thread the color of the ocean, Mom,” and “don’t we have any small scissors?” I used to play sports myself … but now I’m old, and I don’t see my knees holding up in soccer or volleyball games.

That’s what I’m thinking about at Laura’s party. I’m watching my friends, who I have gotten to know at lacrosse games and ice hockey games and back-to-school events and joint kids’ projects, and I’m thinking how dear they are to me, and how I can’t lose them, too, even as I lose my youngest kid.

It’s a party, and there’s cake, and cookies, and lemonade; friends, stories, and easy laughter … but it’s all tinged with fear and sadness. Ah, graduation.