On taking a breather
and a poem for your Monday
“Our journey home was longer than the one coming. We knew the house would echo”
“It’s now Sunday night and I still haven’t found time to finish my blog,” I say to my spouse Janyce as she hands me a cocktail.
“This beauty is a maple lime bourbon sour,” she says as she sets hers down on the tray on the footrest and sits next to me on the couch, pulling the wool blanket over her legs, and leans over to light the candles.
“You did it again,” I say taking a sip. “This is excellent.”
We silently sip cocktails and I can smell the chicken roasting in the oven. It’s still early, barely evening, but now the calendar has slipped into October. I grab my drink and get up to stand in front of the window to watch all the songbirds flocking around the newly washed and filled feeder.
“I had to ask Aidan for his permission to write about him and he said it was okay,” I say, still looking out the window.
“Kris, how about this?” she says. “I really like the direction you are going in. What if you take a little more time with it, weave those things in that you told me about on our walk today, and you just publish it next Saturday? Come over and take a breather with me.”
“You’re right,” I say. “It’s been a very long weekend.”
Janyce is my anchor. My voice of reason. It’s not that she doesn’t get stressed out ever, too. But when that happens, I usually can see her situation as clear eyed as she sees mine. And then I am the anchor.
We had a mostly good weekend, but it was a difficult one too and I have things to say on the subject. So I’m going to publish my half-written blog post next Saturday and take a little more time writing. For you, my readers, on this Monday I’ll leave you with a poem I read just this morning, while I was still in bed drinking my coffee with the dog beside me. If you are a mom, and you sent a kid off to college, you might relate to this one. It might just hit you in the gut like it did for me.
Devon Balwit
Arguably, we fit his whole life in a hand-
basket, hauling it through the quad into the dorm, past bowls of
condoms (way more than any two strangers should need!).
Diffidently, he one-last-hugged us before slipping away,
eager to find his place in the sea of
faces (masked and unmasked)
glimpsed through half-open doorways. His father and I thought of our own college
hellos—hello sexual identity, hello spiritual quests, hello
identification with global independence movements. Our
journey home was longer than the one coming. We
knew the house would echo, that the chickens would
lament their lost protector. I wanted not to be that
mother who over-texts, broadcasting loneliness and
need. Still, my finger hovered
over the keys before I took myself for a walk.
Perhaps I also will discover a new me in these newly
quiet days, but I doubt it. Old
ruts run deep. Not like my son, trying a real
shabbat for the first time, learning
the words to prayers I recite only phonetically. It’s
up to him now to save the world and keep us from
veering even more off course. When I see him next,
we’ll have to establish a new balance, the
x of our family mobile subtly shifted. Just
yesterday, I lamented the demands of motherhood. Now, reset to
zero, I mourn the very freedom I’ve regained.
—from Rattle #77, Fall 2022