We're Nothing Special

And thus do we endure

Everything they owned was in Whit’s canoe. All their worldly goods — the axe, the gun, the kettle, the blankets, a little corn meal, some salt pork, and a few other necessaries — were carefully stowed. And only Whit and Melissa knew that their first child was already on the way. - LeGrand Cannon, Jr.,“Look to the Mountain”

My elder child left today. In this era of extended adolescence and infinite opportunities to remain under the umbrella of one or another institution “in loco parentis,” my 20 year old is setting his own different course, and one that would be more familiar to a young man of a century ago. Having acquired for himself a trusty steed and a pocket full of silver, and a place to stow his bedroll on arrival, he is striking out for an unfamiliar city in an unfamiliar place, there to seek his fortune.

I join the ranks of centuries of mothers before me, who stood steady-faced on the hard dirt before their doors as their green-handed and rose-cheeked boys left home to take up the whaler’s lance, the sharecropper’s scythe, the miner’s pick, the warrior’s sword. In lonesome communion, we have wrung together our own white hands that would so gladly reach out and pull them back, away from this tear-stained world.

From that first bloody moment when their miraculous emergence divides us into two sets of bellowed lungs where before there had been only one, they stretch, further and further, the tether of our breath, and teach us grief and joy beyond what our prior selves could have imagined. And then, one day, just as the umbilical cord that joined us in those first moments must be severed, while yet the bond finds greater strength, this line, too, is cut. It is no longer the same air that we share, but some primal vibration of the earth and sun, whose braids will form the substrate of the tapestry which must exceed and obscure my influence and presence.

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When I was 15, I went to boarding school. I intended to move out, and I did. I found a way to spend summers elsewhere as well, and although there were a few periods where I lived in my parents’ house again, it became the place where I was from, rather than my home. I think I’ve been searching for home ever since, always thinking I have found it over the next horizon, always discovering I have not.

My sister, four years younger, and I got into an argument when I was in my twenties. We were sharing a childhood bedroom in my grandmother’s house, and I snapped at her for being so cold. She was like a stranger to me in those days. She reacted in anger, “You just LEFT! You disappeared. You never called, you never visited. You were my big sister and then you were gone.” It was true; I was so desperate to redefine myself that I turned my back on everyone in my life in the hopes of escaping the pain of my own inner loneliness and confusion.

I make no apologies for that, although I acknowledge the pain that it caused. This casting-off is not always graceful, and the path to ourselves requires diverging from the path of anyone else’s vision. Nonetheless, there is much that I wish I had known, and that, by grace, my own son does know.

But it is right that we do not know, at 15 or 18 or 20, what our mothers feel when we leave them standing in that doorway for the first time.

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This grief is not special, it is not unique, it is not shiny; it is the opposite. This is the moment when I should be least in the spotlight, joining this sublime and painful sisterhood that crosses all dimensions and is, paradoxically, that which we most desire.

It is the grief of success.

But whether life is as we feel it should be, or cruelly and brutally in any form other than that we would choose, these moments are not so precious as we feel, in the midst of them, that they ought to be. They are human, and common, and that common humanness is the every day achievement that is always available for celebration.

Today is just another day. Like every other, and like no other before.

Travel well, my darling, travel light.

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Who am I? I’m Sarah the Homeopath. This human experience is what we are all trying to integrate, and when our health, physical, mental, and emotional, feels like a struggle and beyond the tools of the conventional medical system, that’s where I can help. Embark on healing here: https://calendly.com/innerseahomeopathy/introductory-consultation