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| On Leaving |
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| On coming home to yourself |
Vacation came, vacation went.
I’ve spent the past few days in the post-getaway rhythm of folding whites, restocking pantries, shaking sand from the shoes. This morning I unpacked my suitcase and returned an unread pile of books to my nightstand – a welcome reminder that even beloved hobbies pale in comparison to watching fully-grown boys feed fish food to the Koi.
The truth is this: our family hasn’t been a family of four in a short while. We’ve been a family of three and one, or two and two, the familiar parent equation that lends itself well to balancing children with fulfilling work, but leaves little left for much else.
We needed time. Togetherness. Attention, wholly and undivided, if only for a week or so.
Togetherness we were granted, to the tune of 6 hours in a plane. There was hotel bed jumping and sand crab hunting and – fulfilling my every dream imaginable – a rousing Monday night Laua. (Spent $35 on a dinner, which Max didn't attend, all on account of fish bowls and a margarita.)
We lazed around in the mornings. Played pool volleyball at night. We lugged coolers to the shore and ate sandy bologna with salty hands. Endless Chess matches. Rode surf boards and paddle boards and body boards up and down waves, rivers, to and from the restaurant a block away with the best mud pie I’ve witnessed yet.
It was all so necessary, this last July inhale, and I found myself dizzied with gratitude more often than not.
Now that I’m home, I find myself feeling a singular shift in a familiar direction. It began tonight with a failure to fall asleep at 6pm, unable to adapt to my old schedule. It began with tossing and turning, throwing hard dreams around a soft pillow. Rising around midnight to chip away at a project bigger than myself, heading back to bed to sneak in a few hours of rest before the alarm wakes with the sun.
It began with the understanding that a small part of me was waking alongside of them.
I have always known myself to be slow in adjusting to life post-children around. The empty nest that many mothers describe as a 3-week haze takes upwards of 2 years to burn away for me, and then some.
But I feel it today, a small lifting. The clearing of the sky, the making of a way.
I don’t know if it was the ocean air, or that Morgen picked up a hundred phrases between Kauai and Salt Lake, or that Max has been so quietly clearing his own sky for so many months and I'm swelling with pride alongside of him. I don’t know if it was Markus' warm hand reaching past the middle console for my own, keeping it there through half Hawaii.
But here it is, fully and finally.
The lifting.
Sometimes, it takes a thousand miles to find what you’d never lost.
