Loss With Better Lighting
After my son left, I realized I'd been living inside a chapter all along
This essay is part of the Between Chapters project, inspired by the book. What chapters are you between? How did you get from one chapter to another? Share your story here.
Every night, I send my son in college a goodnight text. Not because he’s waiting for it. Because I am. For the past few years, I’ve been training for this. At least, I thought I was.
The transition from raising a child to watching my son build a life of his own didn’t happen all at once. It happened so gradually that I almost missed it. Until I didn’t. A little more independence. Fewer phone calls. More texts. More goodbyes.
I told myself I was adjusting. Then he started talking about what comes after college. All the feelings I thought I’d made peace with came rushing back.
No one warns you that getting what you want can feel like loss.
When my son was younger, my days had shape. A son to wake. Lessons to plan. Dinners to prepare. Somewhere to be.
I raised my son while still raising myself — newly divorced, homeschooling him in the margins of a professor’s life. He sat in the back of my classroom working on his schoolwork while I taught. I fell asleep on the couch over a manuscript after he went to bed.
This was supposed to be the good part. Instead, I found myself standing in a space I hadn’t planned for. No ceremony. No title page. No moment that announced one chapter had ended and another had begun.
One day, I was needed everywhere all at once. The next, I was standing in the kitchen at 7:00 am wondering why the house felt so wrong when nothing in it had moved.
The refrigerator still hums. The sprinklers click on before dawn. I hear every sound. Nothing is “wrong.” That’s the problem.
The evenings are the hardest. No dinners planned around someone else’s schedule. No hearing him wander into the kitchen late at night, searching the freezer for something to eat before settling on a burrito. These days, much of our conversation happens through a screen.
How was class? Did you get home okay? Good luck on your exam. Goodnight.
Sometimes I pass his room and pause in the doorway. Nothing dramatic. No tears. No longing for the past. Just a quiet awareness that a room can remain exactly the same while everything about it changes.
Occasionally, I catch myself watching parents with younger children and feeling jealous. I’ve been the one telling them, “enjoy this time; it goes by too fast!” while they stare back with exhaustion in their eyes. I used to stare back the same way.
The chapters blur together in hindsight. I just miss living inside that chapter before I knew it was one.
For so long, I knew exactly where my energy belonged. Then one day I looked up and realized some of it belonged to me. I don’t quite know who I am after spending decades becoming who I needed to be. A mother, still, but different now.
The life I’d worked so hard to build was still there. I was still there. Yet I’d begun to feel slightly out of step with all of it, like a woman standing outside a window looking in. For a long time, I treated this season like a hallway. Something to move through on the way to the real story. But a hallway is still a room if you’re standing in it.
Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to my novel. The manuscript exists. Beginning, middle, end. Technically finished. Still awaiting revision. So am I. So I do what I’ve always done. I teach. I write. I show up for the people I love. The difference now is that I’m trying to be one of them.
Some days this season looks like possibility. Some days it looks like loss with better lighting. Most days it’s both, sometimes before noon.
When my son was young, I thought it was simply life. I didn’t know I was living inside a chapter. I didn’t understand what it meant until it was already gone. Maybe that’s true of this one too.
So tonight, like every night, I’ll pick up my phone. I’ll type goodnight. I’ll wait. I’ll watch the three dots appear. And that small thing — that one quiet habit built for him and kept for me — might be the most honest thing about where I am right now. Still here. Still showing up. Still figuring out what this chapter is about.
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I can relate to this. I have two adult sons and I’m used to it now. But when they first left, it was unexpectedly…empty. Thank you for sharing!
So beautifully captured, Mihal. I recall those days with my daughter and it feels like yesterday. In truth 12 years have passed and we’ve both walked through other hallways, other transitions in that time. It doesn’t get less bittersweet, but I’m learning to savor the now, and expect bittersweet-ness over and over again. It’s what letting our birds fly is truly about.