First Person

EMPTY NESTING REDUX

WHAT I LEARNED BY THE SECOND GOODBYE

On August 20, 2019, five days after her 18th birthday, our only child moved 1,010 miles away to attend college in Portland, Oregon. I’d been doing the departure math since her acceptance letter arrived, but mentally preparing for years. Forget graduation and prom; I started mourning when she was still in grade school. Was this the last Easter egg hunt? The final princess-themed Halloween costume? No more hidden notes from Leppy the leprechaun or silver coins tucked under her pillow?

“I’m not dying,” she said whenever she saw that look. Maybe it’s all the Grimms’ fairy tales I read as a kid, but I suffer persistent fears about her safety. By any objective standard, my worries are improbable. Abduction always tops the list. Any disappearance, really. The common concerns — car accidents and grave illnesses — also play across my mental movie screen. My mother-mind dreams up dangerous scenarios and then reenacts them in loops. I feel the desire to seal my daughter inside her room like Rapunzel. But even that’s risky. On one vacation, when she was small, I kept picturing her falling out her fifth-story bedroom window. Whenever the fear arrived, I rushed into her room. “What are you doing?” I asked. She finally caught on and looked up with a worn-out expression. “I was thinking of jumping out the window,” she said. “But I decided to read.”

I call it “grief rehearsal” — the attempt to prepare for loss by mentally reenacting it again and again. I psychologically stack various disaster scenarios on top of each other into a layer cake of sadness and panic. Reality cannot compete with my imagination. The feared day of her departure arrived. On a sweltering August afternoon, she moved into a dorm room with a stocked mini-fridge and a newly made twin XL bed, a thousand miles from home. After several bear hugs and a humiliating breakdown in an upscale Portland bistro, I let her go. I made a pact with another bereaving mom. Every day for the month of September, we’d text a photo of ourselves having fun. Museum trips, beach walks, dinners out and weekend getaways. Anything that showed life beyond our daughters. Bonus points if we smiled. Weirdly, after a few weeks, it worked. I felt OK.

I missed her, of course, but it helped that every phone call home was filled with enthusiasm about her new life. She’d fallen for a wonderful guy, met a group of good friends and mostly loved her professors. Still, panic sometimes rose in the night. Was she walking alone after dark? Had she been snatched off Portland’s streets? Did she take a sketchy Uber? Then the one disaster I could not have predicted happened. On March 16, 2020, my daughter was forced home from college, sequestered in our house with her parents. And like those childhood fables, my forbidden wish came with consequences and ended with regret. Her heartbreak was palpable. She missed her boyfriend and the independence of college life. Portland was her place. Those were her people. After a lifetime of enduring the uncomfortable fit of Orange County, she’d found herself in college. She took up quilting and gardening and baking. She sprung for a sewing machine, some planting boxes

and bags of soil. But distractions weren’t enough. She started sleeping more and eating less. She watched high school friends on social media gather for parties and group vacations, but she stayed the quarantine course. Soon there weren’t enough “Modern Family” episodes to stave off her sadness. Her helium personality began to deflate. I’d never seen her this low.

By the beginning of August 2020, a decision needed to be made about whether to return to campus or study at home. Portland had endured a hard summer. In addition to 100 straight days of social unrest, wildfires were eating at Oregon’s forests. Peaceful protestors were arrested in the streets, and threats were made near-daily to declare a state of emergency. A contentious election loomed heavy on the horizon.

There would be no normal dorm life. Students would be isolated in their rooms, masks required even when brushing their teeth. Wastewater would be tested, and contaminated residence halls quarantined. Classes would be held online from dorm rooms with inadequate Wi-Fi. If I worried last August when life looked normal, how would I cope? “I want to go back,” she said. How could I argue? On August 17, 2020, she left again. Her boyfriend flew in and together they drove to his home in Salt Lake, and then the long road back to Portland. By September, Oregon’s wildfires were so bad, smoke alarms blasted through the dorms at night. Students soaked their masks in water and shoved towels under their doors. In January, an ice storm hit Portland so hard, trees fell across the campus, crushing a few cars. Downtown shop windows stayed boarded. The city remained seized by social unrest. COVID uncertainty escalated each day. I figured any day she might come home, and I’d get another reprieve from my again empty nest. But in the spring of 2021, she announced her decision to stay. She rented a house off-campus with a posse of friends. She signed a lease. She planted a garden and hung a hammock. As she nested into her own home, a second layer of empty nesting began for me, this one catching me off-guard by its sudden permanence. While my mind continues to manufacture worries all the time, none of them compare to the memory of watching her wither. No longer do I wish her home. This alone is a comfort.

In mid-July this year, she came down for a four-day weekend. She hadn’t been home since January, and probably wouldn’t be back until Christmas break. I felt a breathless frenzy to not waste time on sleep or small talk. We went to the spa, the movies, lunch and shopping. We walked Laguna’s art festivals and drove the coast. We hit all her favorite restaurants and cooked her favorite foods.

But my heart stayed on guard all weekend, already mourning Monday. On the drive to John Wayne, I vowed no more embarrassing airport scenes. She offered up stories to distract me. By the time we arrived, I realized the futility of my promise and opted to cry at the curb instead of my usual TSA line breakdown.

“I wish you guys could move up there,” she said, pulling her suitcase from the trunk. I wrapped my daughter in my arms one more time, using her backpack as my hanky, and said, “Careful what you wish for.”

LAST LOOK

“Resemblance”

By Janet Bludau | 24” x 24” Oil on canvas JanetBludau.com, 949.285.0330 IG: @bludauart

Award-winning artist Janet Bludau describes her work as abstracted realism. She intuitively applies color, inserting shapes and graphic lines to achieve her desired effect, and is especially known for her landscapes and seascapes. Janet works from her studio in Cannery Village, Newport Beach.