If you’ve been listening to the radio, you might have heard that song–the one that goes, “Soon I’ll be 60 years old…I hope my children come and visit once or twice a month.” I hear this song all the time, but as things sometimes do, this time the lyrics struck a cord in my emotionally muddled mind. Suddendly, I was sad. Really sad. Bleary eyed, crying while drivng and about to run us off into the ditch kind of sad. I took a deep breath and tried to gather myself together before I caused an accident.
First of all, I was sad about the math that indicates I am closer to 60 years old than I am to high school, which is more than two decades in the past. Even more than that, when I’m 60, will I really only see my children once or twice a month? Is that all I can hope for? The same people I spend nearly all my time with now? The same people who until recently couldn’t seem to live without me long enough to use the bathroom by myself? The same people who can’t seem to make themselves a snack without asking me 42 questions? I can’t even imagine life like that. Yes, I want them to grow up, go out and see the world, even if that means moving away from me. That doesn’t make it any less unbelievable and heartbreaking that I may not probably won’t see or talk to them every day.
Of course, this made me start quietly sobbing again while driving down the road. So that my blurry vision didn’t cause an accident, I tried the clenching your butt cheeks trick. (Which, I am sure you know, is the way to stop crying at completely inappropriate times, right? While it works well while standing up and givng a speech, I’ll have you know that it’s effectiveness is marginal while sitting down in a minivan.) While I still struggled not to drip snot all over the steering wheel, the butt clenching helped enough that I could talk without my voice cracking. So I asked the big kid in the back seat, “When you go off to college, do you promise to call or text me every day to let me know you are alive and went to class and didn’t drink too much the night before?”
He responded, “Sure, Mom.” Oh, how I love you, child. I always knew you were a good kid. “Of course, you know some days I’ll have to just text that I’m alive. I can’t always promise the other two. “ Cue the tears again. Good thing we had arrived at our destinations and I had to pull into a parking lot right about then so we didn’t crash into a tree. This is the job of a mom–to be all the things for everyone until suddenly, you are not.
