Laurustina

This morning, Mouse and I woke at 6:15 so we could load up his things and get to the Greyhound station in time to catch the bus rolling out to Santa Cruz at 7:00 a.m. I don’t think he even realized that he’d chosen to travel on a holiday, that he was making his grand stand for independence on Independence Day, but by design or accident, he went off this morning, on his first adventure into the adult world, his first attempt at making his own way.

Except for his last three months of high school, when we came back to the valley and he stayed behind to graduate, I have lived with this boy for the last twenty years…longer than anyone else in my life except my own mother. And it pained me, especially in light of Ash’s death, to let him go in such a casual way.

We listened to a new CD on the ride, one I burned a few nights ago, which I flippantly titled “11 tracks for Alice and Jesus”. We’ve always shared music, my Mouse and I, and this morning it was Tom Waits, Johnny Cash, Nick Cave and Joe Cocker, who carried us down to 9th st. and then sang me (with tears streaming) home.

It wasn’t suppose to be like this. He wasn’t supposed to be the last to leave home. I wasn’t supposed to find myself childless at 40, half hoping, utterly unfairly, that his first attempt to fly is less than a grand success. Oh I want him to be happy and I completely understand his desire to be back in the comfort of that one place, which still feels like home.

I just don’t know if I know what I’m supposed to do tomorrow morning without him here. I don’t know who I’m supposed to be when after twenty years, I find myself suddenly not actively being Mom. And I know there’s nothing special or extraordinary about this feeling. I expected to face it someday in the far-enough-away-that-i-don‘t-need-to-think-too-much-about-it-yet future. But the future came three years early, at 6:15 this morning, when my eldest child…now my only child…spread his wings while I closed my eyes, held my breath and let him try to fly.

I have been thinking about this space for a while now, mulling over its purpose at this point in my life. The joy of my “bloggy youth” is long gone. Even before we tore down lilywhiteintentions I had gotten lazy and disenchanted. Everything got too public. People I never intended to engage were suddenly peering over my shoulder. My words became weapons more than once. Then life got more complicated and I pulled up stakes, wandered around a bit and finally ended up here. I never did find my groove again, which left me frustrated and even more unmotivated to write.

Then, of course, the floor fell out of everything and I find myself changed, barely writing at all, only writing about Ash, and writing out of grief when I do manage to string a handful of words together. Its how I process. That bit hasn’t changed. And I suppose that half the truth is that I’ve been “processing” pubicly for so long that it is second nature, somehow part of the whole, um…process.

And so, I have been thinking, mulling…trying to decide if it is better to give this space up completely or change how I think of it and in doing so, how I use it. I realized tonight, how easy it would be to go back and fill in the blanks of the year before this one, a year of unimaginable changes, whirring and whirling so fast there was never time to write it all down. It would be good to do that. Therapeutic anyway. Not necessarily a spectator sport though.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve been doing this for so long (however infrequently these last couple of years) that I hardly know how to write anymore without it. But that doesn’t feel like enough to a reason (or the right reason, if you will) to write here, to keep this space alive.