I'm standing at a surprise birthday party chatting with a dear friend after the big surprise! moment has occurred.
"Well, this is an above-average Sunday night," she says, as we juggle plates of cake with our cocktails, giggle at the custom balloons with our pal's face smiling out at us.
"I usually go to yoga on Sunday nights with Annie," I say. "We started going again after Christmas, and now it's been our thing: 5:30 class, and we come home to whatever dinner Jason's made, all glowy and zen for the week ahead. Last week her friend came along with us, and this week she's there right now with two friends --" I pause, mid-realization. "She and I used to go together, a mom-and-Annie thing, and now she's going with her friends; it's a metaphor." I look at my friend with big eyes, and she, one of the most compassionate people I know, looks back. Says nothing. Smiles helplessly.
On a walk with Jason a couple weeks ago, I told him I was probably going to be a little bit sad all the time for at least the next six months. He looked at me sideways, cautiously.
"Could you at least . . . wait until she leaves in August or September to get sad?" he asked.
I thought about it for a second. "I don't think so," I said. "It's already started." It's lurking around the edges of everyday moments. I've started staring at her for longer than necessary when she's doing homework at the dining room table, noticing how the round profile of her cheek is still identical to the curve of her toddler face, smelling her head surreptitiously when I can get close enough to her on her couch (she loves this, as you can imagine). I've gotten sentimental about the stinky socks she leaves on the floor around the house after practice, about the smell of her perfume, about the sound of her footsteps coming up the back stairs before she bursts into the house after a long day.
Are there still moments, possibly daily, when a skirmish erupts and our voices get louder and louder as we parry and interrupt and raise our eyebrows across the kitchen island? There are.
Are there others, when we end up talking in the hot tub so long our fingers prune, when I happen to be upstairs when she's getting in bed and I scratch her back until she's almost asleep, when she shows me a TikTok she and her friend made and we laugh so much and watch it three times in a row? There are.
Same as it ever was, I know, and if I forget, I can read back through the things I wrote when she was three and had to be carried home from a playdate down the street under one arm, when she was five and heartbroken over the last day of kindergarten, when she baked her first cake or spent the whole day building with Legos or set a school record at the state meet or wrote the sweetest thank-you note to me for helping her with her college essays.
There are days when I'm dazed with gratitude for what we crammed in. I'll see a photo of her, age 10, hiking in the dunes under a resplendent sun, or her, age 13, eating dinner in a Parisian cafe at dusk, or her, playing the piano, or her, reading in bed, or her, chopping vegetables, and I think thank God we did that. Thank goodness those experiences are all tucked inside her, Russian nesting dolls of people and places and stories and skills she can take with her out into the world.
Other days, I feel panicky, start making mental lists (sometimes actual lists!) of books she has to read or documentaries she needs to watch or little bits of knowledge I suddenly worry she won't have when she needs to call on them. Does she know how to check her bank statement? Should I find her a self-defense course? What have we forgotten to teach her?
Sunday afternoon, before the party, I semi-accidentally fell asleep in Annie's bed for twenty minutes. She came in from outside, found me, and, in a rare moment of unforced cuddling, laid down next to me on top of the comforter.
"Awww," I said, half asleep, cognizant even in my drowsy state that moments like this are rare and about to be rarer.
She held still for a minute, and it was just the sounds of our breathing, in sync, the way it is during class when we begin in child's pose, our mats next to each other. Sometimes I sneak a look to my left and marvel at the strong, lithe, sinewy body, give thanks for the strength and poise and inner knowing she's cultivated over seventeen years of practice in the real world, plus a few dozen classes next to me.
She held still for a minute, and it was just her long, blond hair in my face and my arm slung around her side. Then: "You're going to miss me so much when I'm gone!" She popped up and laughed. "I'm leaving for yoga," she said. "Can one of my friends use your mat?"
