Extra Spicy

I had lunch with one of my oldest and dearest friends today. We met many summers ago at our local community center with little kids in tow when she came up to me to tell me what a cute pregnant person I was (I was pregnant with Grace at the time). We became fast friends and have maintained that level of candor throughout the years.

We had a lot of ground to cover today; the past three months for her alone have held a wedding, a college graduation, and a kid moving out! Out of the two of us, I’ve always been a little more mild-mannered, and she has always had this beautiful ability to speak her mind! But today, I was the one in all of my feelings and expressing them, expletives and all, until she finally said, “Boy, you’re extra spicy today!” It was said with love, of course, but she wasn’t wrong.

That is the perfect description of how I feel. Lots of big emotions bumping into each other, creating such extraordinary discomfort that I know I just need to sit through it to get to the other side.

We moved Rowan over the weekend, and he started his first college classes this morning. Grace arrived home on Saturday evening after 8 weeks in France. Isabelle is packing to move out in 12 days. And for an extra bit of fun, I’m having my wisdom teeth removed on Friday.

But here is where the anxiety lives: Grace goes back to school in three weeks, and there’s still no place for her to live. Her two roommates, girls she considered best friends, called her a week before she left for France to say they no longer wanted to live with her. (Literally WHAT??)

This anxiety runs parallel to the LGBTQ-specific fears that already pop up this time of year. Safety has always been a big one for me. And now with the living situation layered on top, that worry is tenfold. If you’re a parent of a queer college student, you know this math already: depending on the school, town, or state, especially those that are notoriously unkind to the LGBTQ community, any number of concerns may be running through your head right now, too. It is fully one of those situations where the logic of your mind and emotions in your body are at odds, where we ultimately have to take a breath, know that we’ve done our due diligence, empowered our kids as much as we possibly can, and sit in the discomfort until we evolve to the other side.

The ticking clock and my current level of spiciness are for sure contributing to the mental list of things I’d like to say to the cruel and cowardly girls who created this extra stressor to begin with. AND I recognize that won’t help us make progress on the task at hand or help Grace move forward. (Though, to be honest, she has once again dazzled me with her resilience and wisdom.)

There is also something in the middle of all of this that I haven’t quite identified yet. Something that feels sticky and uncomfortable. Something so abstract that I’m having a tough time naming it; it is just ricocheting in the hollowed-out area around my heart. It feels like it needs to be acknowledged, though, before I can fully move through all of these events. Like, in order to be the best possible support for my kids, whether it is a move, a phone call, or a new situation that just needs some silent mom support, I need to at the very least acknowledge the mess that this clump of feelings has created, and honor them by being kind to myself.

I don’t have a tidy answer today. Just a heart that is equal parts aching and in awe. Energy that is boomeranging from high highs to low lows. Feeling so proud of how ready each of my kids is as they cross their individual threshold into this next big moment for them, while feeling so sad that this chapter of motherhood is complete.

And there it is. The thing with change. We have to leave something behind to start something new.