Sometimes love means extending forgiveness and giving another chance, even when your loved one lashes out at you and wounds you to the point where you are afraid to love again.##M:[more]##
This is not the beginning of some corny summer romance novel. This explains why Will has decided to keep Pikachu, his teddy bear hamster, instead of farming him out to a friend for adoption, which was the plan last week. “Mrs. Brossman, come quick,” his friend had called out that fateful day. “Pikachu bit Will and he’s really hurt.” Thoroughly alarmed, I rushed over to Will and indeed, it was his worst bite ever. He had even dripped drops of blood on the kitchen floor, but he was not crying, just annoyed. I bandaged up his ring finger on his left hand and he went off to baseball practice.
But the bloom was definitely off the romance and I thought history was going to repeat itself the way it had when Molly’s hamster bit her and we ended up giving him away, condo and all, to her friend on the farm.
Actually, in addition to forgiving Pikachu and giving him another chance, Will is on a campaign to rescue a golden retriever. The family menagerie keeps growing. For this, we can give thanks to my friend, Carmen, whose family has just rescued their second greyhound, a lovable big guy named Gunner who joins Koop, their first rescued racing dog.
I love the idea of taking in a pet that otherwise may be doomed for a premature death by euthanasia. Will has already done all sorts of research online and in fact, has found what he thinks will be an ideal addition to the family — a 16-month-old female golden retriever named Nikki. I’ve given him the phrase known and dreaded by most children whose parents are not quite sure they want to proceed but don’t want to shut down hopes outright: we’ll see.
Will seems to be inclined to feather the nest not with creature comforts to make his own life more comfortable, but with actual creatures, because he knows that the nest will be much more empty come fall. Big sister’s going off to college — why not get another pet to take her place? That’s one way of dealing with it.
I know that while I’m excited that Katie will have new opportunities and an exciting new life on campus, there is a new wistfulness to our lives as parents knowing that the countdown is on to her flying off to her new life.
We’re already getting a taste of it, with Molly gone the last three weeks in Minnesota. The house seems empty and quiet. I can smell the scent of her favorite perfume in her room, strange, because it feels like she should be coming in noisily through the door any minute, but it will be another week before that happens. There is a part of me that feels hollow.
It’s weird, because there have been times in my suburban mom life over the last many years that I’ve yearned for peace and quiet and time alone, and now that I’m getting some I feel a hint of loneliness. Crazy, right?
Luckily, Will is still very young so it will be years before it happens with us, but we have some friends who already have completely empty nests, and they have confirmed how strange it feels in the beginning. The entire family dynamic changes so completely — and this is why houses are put on the market, new sports cars are purchased, new careers embarked upon.
This is the first summer where the relative quiet in my house has pushed me to think about the horizons past active parenthood. Would I want to resume my career in New York, would I want to go back to school, would I want to downsize our house and travel more? Again, the reality of that scenario is still pretty far away, but given that I had my first child at the age of 30 and some of our friends are already there, it has given me something to think about.
Trite but true, time has accelerated in recent years, and it is bittersweet to think that all those years I thought of as the future are suddenly the here and now. Katie is excited to go dorm shopping, and all those Bed Bath and Beyond coupons I’ve been hoarding will come in very handy. We’ve been filling out forms for college orientation and making move-in day reservations. It was only yesterday that I was filling out Girl Scout cookie forms for her and summer camp sign-ups. Sometimes in the throes of Suburban Motherhood you wonder — will this day never end, will we ever get past this phase — and then one day you wake up and you realize yes, you have indeed moved on to an entirely new place.
Sometime during the month of August I plan to lock myself into a place in the most remote part of my house and cry and cry until all my tears are gone, so I am capable of being sane when I drop my child off at her dorm and say good-bye. I don’t want to be excessively maudlin, and so I will need to prepare, both for my sake and for hers. I will think back to the first time I left her with a babysitter, the first time I put her on the school bus, the first time . . .
And then I will put on my happy face, go home, and try to look forward only with joy and anticipation to this newest chapter of our lives.
