Two weeks ago I helped my youngest daughter move into a dorm room, hugged her goodbye, and drove home to the quietest house I’ve ever lived in.
As we were grabbing a few last minute things from inside our house before hitting the road, she was doing her usual thing: singing. (She’ll be studying music, specifically to sing opera.) She was singing one of the songs from Les Mis, and it hit me: the music that has been filling my home since she could string two words together was about to go silent. I hurried into my bedroom before I dissolved into tears in front of her — and I am actually weeping as I type this, because that’s a big absence. She. Sings. Beautifully.
I had her at forty. My older two were nine and twelve when I decided I wasn’t done having babies, and after getting my husband on board, I got to do the whole ride all over again — start to finish. I don’t regret a minute of it. What I do regret is how fast it went.
And through it all, the book I wanted to write waited. I dreamed of it during her baby years, then started it but set it aside to launch my coaching business to help pay for her school. I got back to it when she started driving and needing me less. (I saw this freight train coming down the tracks.)
Months ago it hit me that the hardest part of taking her to college wasn’t going to be missing her — though I miss her plenty. It was that a season that made up more than half of my life was ending. I don’t think we’re ever done parenting. But the version of it that organized my whole life was about to be over, and I could walk into whatever came next empty-handed, or I could build something to carry into it.
I read something recently about this next season — that mothering in this next phase is about becoming the person who gathers a scattered family back together for dinners, holidays, milestones big and small. I’m still working out what that looks like for us. Since last November, though, I’ve been working on the other half of it too: something of my own, so I could meet this ending with a sense of adventure instead of a sense of loss.
So this summer — the last summer before she left — I did a thing for which I felt a little bit guilty. I took a week away from my family, alone in our camper, and I finished my book. All those years of not quite finishing the edits, not quite writing that last chapter, and it took about seven days of quiet to type “The end.”
Now I’m editing it and doing everything I’ve told my clients to do for years: good enough is good enough, done is better than perfect, get the book out into the world. That advice is easier to give than to live.
Here’s what the season built. My debut novel, The Sickness of Secrets, comes out October 22 — the first book in The Borrowing series, gritty paranormal suspense about what we inherit, what we hide, and what it costs to survive. And the short story that opens the memory-borrowing world, a prequel called “The Inheritance,” is one of twenty original thrillers in Last Roll of the Die, an anthology edited by J.D. Barker and Mary Stone. You can back it today.
So that’s where I’ve been. Now I want to hear about you. What season is ending in your life right now — and what are you building to carry into the next one?
I heard recently that your fifties are the adolescence of old age. Not sure how I feel about that.
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