on learning to be a mother from afar

My first ever post published on GGC was about carrying Archer with me everywhere. It’s a little embarrassing to share it. All of those early posts are. I have been tempted to take GGC down on many occasions — but my kids like that it’s still there. That they can search the archives of their childhood. I have asked them over the years if there is anything I have written that they want me to take down, but the answer has always been no.

I feel the same way. I like that I am different now. And I don’t mind that once upon a time, I was younger and felt differently about things.

I also feel I owe it to Hal to keep the whole thing up — so many of his greatest hits are in there. So many of our greatest hits are there.

Here lies the other life. The one that grew this one. The one that started and ended there.

***

Later this afternoon, Archer will come home for Thanksgiving after being gone for almost three months. I’m so excited about it but I’m also doing the thing I always do when I’m afraid I’m going to get attached to someone I have to let go of. Trying to play it cool, like, yeah yeah, catch you on the flipside, son.

I remember the first time I came home for the holidays when I was eighteen. How all I wanted was to reunite with old friends. Go to local bars with my fake ID. Bum cigarettes off the boys who never left.

I remember how strange it felt to come home to a house that wasn’t mine anymore — to sleep in my old bedroom as a woman, who was just getting started in her new life — surrounded by old photos and art that suddenly felt so unlike me.

My parents still live in the house that I grew up in and it still feels strange. And even though I haven’t gone to any local bars in my hometown in at least a decade, I still think about the boys who never left. See them pop up on dating apps whenever I’m home. Like, holy shit, we’re all single again, aren’t we. Anyone have a cigarette?

It was different for me at his age. I moved to LA from San Diego and went back and forth on the weekends. I was still so close to home. Even now, I am still so close to the place I grew up. Two hours door to door without traffic.

For Archer it’s different. He tells me as much on the phone when he explains to me what it feels like to pack his bags to come home. How strange it feels to have two homes now. Two lives. What will it feel like to come back and then to leave again.

Which one will feel more like home? he wonders. Here or there?

I don’t know, I say back.

I wonder, too.

***

An all-girl house is not the same as a not-all-girl house. The energy settles differently now. There are new photos on the fridge, a broken cabinet that wasn’t there before, and plants that have died and been replaced with new ones.

We are a different kind of loud without our boy. A choir without a bass.

And everyone is always bleeding.

***

When Archer offered to write a guest post here last week, I was elated. It felt like the passing of the torch — the baby I first introduced to the world eighteen years ago, was now introducing himself… and he was doing so in this really brave, beautiful, wise and vulnerable way.

Hours after he sent me his post, I realized as proud as I was of his work, I was also terrified to publish it.

It is far easier to put oneself out there than it is to stand back while your child does the same (even if that's been your entire goal as a parent -- to raise the kinds of kids who do.)

I gave him the option to put his words behind a paywall — to make it less public — but he refused. He wanted it to be public. It was his truth and he wanted everyone to read it. He wanted people to feel however they were going to feel about it. Something of course, I understood.

I also suddenly understood someone else: my mother.

I immediately texted her to tell her so. And then I asked how she’s managed to cope all these years with me doing the same exact thing.

“Oh, it’s been hard!” she told me. “But it gets easier. I’ve had to learn to honor all of your choices. And that includes what you write about and share.”

I held my breath and published his post.

And then a few days later, I helped him set up his own substack. (Coming soon, he says. Standby…)

I have several posts in drafts about what life has been like without him — me learning to parent (and not parent) from afar.

The phone calls and missed calls and “I can’t help you with that, I’m not there!” and “Are you sure you don’t need my help with that? I’m right here.”

In many ways, we have become closer since he left. But also, I don’t know what his life looks like anymore. I can only see shadows from here.

“What if it feels different when I come home?” he asked me on the phone yesterday.

“I have asked myself the same question," is what I told him.

And then we both agreed that it will feel different and that’s okay.

It’s also why I’ve felt so lonely these last few days. Like, somehow his return means he’s actually gone. That his sisters will go, too. That this is the first holiday where my child is a visitor in my home. That someday they will all be visitors.

We have only spent holidays at my parents house but for the first time in my entire adult life, I want to spend them here at this/our/my home. Because it all looks different from this side of things. (We’ll still go down to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving but only for the day. And then we’ll have a second dinner — Shabbat style — Friday night with friends at our place. We are calling it Shabbatsgiving. A brand new tradition. First year running. Welcome.)

I blinked and become the person with the house that the children come home to. The parent in my child’s hometown.

***

I carried all my babies in carriers when they were small. Bo only slept attached to my body for her first year of life and I carried Revie in the Ergo until she was well into her toddler years. Fable in a sling.

I was telling Bo about this the other night while she lay on my chest — that it reminded me of when she was little. The way her face used to stick to my skin and make a soup.

“Ewwwww,” she said.

“OH I LOVED IT!” I said back.

And I did. I loved carrying all of my kids around with me. I loved being a mom from up close. Attached to my kids like we were two-headed. Like we were four-armed. Like we were we.

I have thought quite often about my pregnancies these last few months while my daughters had birthdays and my son went away. I have thought almost obsessively of the changes that occur in utero and how they mirror, in so many ways, the first eighteen years of life. The letting go at birth is not so different than the packing of bags many years later. How a child’s exit from the home is not unlike the exit from the body. That our skins stretch to contain the life that will leave us. How after they go, the walls hold each room differently because of course - the flesh forever changed.

We carry our children in our arms until they become too heavy. Hold them safe within our homes until we become the weight that holds them back.

And then we let them go, only to anticipate their return. Their storytelling. Their separateness. And all that it means to come back together knowing we must let them go again.

And again.

And again.

Even when we still think of them — and ourselves — like this: