How do you reclaim yourself when your child goes to college?

There weren’t enough available seats together on the return flight. We’d have to split up; one person in our party would have to sit in another row. And after three days of moving our daughter into college in California we really wanted the time to hang out on the return flight to Massachusetts, as much as watching a movie together on a lunchbox-sized screen while trapped in a hurtling tube of steel counts as hanging out.

But wait, my husband said. She’s not coming back with us. She’s actually staying there for college, this is real, so we need one less ticket for the return trip.

Not coming back with us. She will be a whole plane flight away from home. This will not be a drop-in-for-a-movie situation. But who will I look for river rocks with when she’s gone? Who will do the hard part of Roblox mountain climbing games for me? Who will make perfect lemon bars?

But distance isn’t even the worst part. It’s time. Where did my little girl go? Where, for that matter, did I go?

A few years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night to a sudden rainstorm beating angry tiny fists against the roof, an absolute deluge where just hours before I was laying in the hammock under a clear sky watching house wren parents flit in and out of a birdhouse, feeding their hatchlings. When you’re dry and cozy in your bed, rain on the roof is such a comforting … “RAIN!” I yelled and sprinted out of bed and downstairs, outside to where my elderly Jeep sat sad in the driveway where I had left it without putting the top on because I forgot to check the overnight weather. The footwells already held an inch of warm summer water.

I grabbed a blue tarp and a beach umbrella out of the garage. At least the tarp was wadded up and not folded, so it was easier to throw over the top of the Jeep like a king-sized top sheet, then I stood on the running boards pulling the tarp this way then that until the Jeep was covered.

The pouring rain was already pooling heavily in the center of the tarp between the roll bars. I grabbed the beach umbrella and wiggled myself under the tarp then carefully opened the passenger door and squeezed myself and the umbrella onto the seat. I raised the umbrella high; when the tines were above the roll bars I deployed it. Once the umbrella handle was wedged between the seats, I had a nice waterproof tent.

I pulled the drain plug out of the passenger seat footwell and squeezed between the driver’s seat and steering wheel to pull the plug from that side as well. Then I fell back into the passenger seat. Barefoot, no bra, pajama pants on backward, wet as if I just walked out of the lake.

I sat in that swampy seat and listened to the rain on the tarp. There were no phones vibrating with urgent messages, no lunches that needed to be made, no laundry that needed to be done, no dogs barking, no requests. No lists or obligations or distractions.

Just the rain. The world was divided into two spaces: under the tarp or outside the tarp. The peace in the former was immense.

The wind picked up enough to fiddle with the sides of the tarp. I reluctantly squeezed back out the passenger door, under the tarp edge, and ran into the garage for a handful of bungee cords to hook through the tarp grommets and pull tight on the Jeep’s frame. Then I went back inside.

We need these moments of solitude from our lives, our children, to reclaim our sense of self, to hold close that identity that belongs to no one but ourselves. The birth of a child comes with a massive identity shift, one of the most significant before-vs-after events in a life. And in that after, moments of feeling like one’s true self are rare but crucial. But now I look back on that night, on all those moments of time to myself, and don’t relate at all. Faced with my daughter’s departure, I want to spend every spare moment with her. Where did that version of myself go whose identity was not completely entwined with parenthood? How do I reclaim myself, again, after she’s gone?

In the week after the Jeep was soaked in the rain, the house wren chicks fledged. It took two days. On the first day they fell out of the birdhouse — plop — onto the grass and I put them back; the next day they tried it again and flew. They lingered in the backyard chattering in the lilac and Rose of Sharon bushes, then flew over the fence and were gone.

This article originally appeared on BostonGlobe.com on August 17, 2026.