Well, she made it to week #2. I made it to week #2. Only time will tell if the mitigation efforts on campus are actually working or not. So many campuses have had a false start to the semester. I do not worry about my girl following directions; she is fanatical about health safety. I am concerned that her peers will tire of the rules and infect one another needlessly.
Even so, I am happy she gets this opportunity. We text every day, sometimes many times per day. I stand in her room, surveying the cleaning job I am nearly done with, feeling proud of myself for ignoring the little pangs of missing her while I sort through the piles of clothes and accumulations of trinkets, coins, and junk. The little shrines I erect to her collections of soccer, choir, high school and college acceptance events remain on the multitude of surfaces in her bedroom. I lay on the bed and take stock of the time that has passed; from when her room was my room and she shared the spare room in cribs with her twin brother, to now, far from us all.
In a week, her twin will begin his classes – online and at home – giving neither of us the experience of an old life closed and a new life begun. I won’t have his absence be the trigger for a deep cleansing of that bedroom; lord knows it needs it. Just as the other remaining child’s presence does not allow for reclamation of the spaces he inhabits. Our home remains overrun by clutter, and years of accumulation. And as much as I long for the clutter and accumulation to be dealt with, I am glad for the children that remain and the normalcy they represent. But, oh, how I miss my girl.
They say that you get used to your children’s absence. I struggle with what is to become of me now that the most active stage of my mothering is coming to an end; my other personas are not as developed, or as beloved, as that one. Time will tell.