Leaving my nest

I have been to the mountain's middle.

Last week, my husband and I celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary under towering trees in the shadow of our hometown volcano.

We spent four days without responsibilities, without work, without anything we had to do or anywhere we had to be (thanks, Dad and Juju!). Four days of one foot in front of the other up the trail until the trail became a ridge and the ridge became a viewpoint that opened its arms to us and held us in our precious insignificance for a while before we walked back down to the forest floor.

Four days of quiet, of peace, of a long, sweet conversation between two people and no reason for it to end.

Finally, finally, finally, I have been to Tahoma, more recently called Mount Rainier. (Did you know that Captain George Vancouver “named” the volcano after his buddy Peter Rainier before he even stepped off of his ship?)

I loved that mountain beyond my wildest imaginings. I can’t believe those soft emerald paths and glittering waterfalls have been just two hours away all of these years.

I started plotting my return before we even left.

Our children take up so much space in our daily lives, and this is mostly a wonderful thing. I am grateful for our noisy, merry, messy home where we can be ourselves together. I love the culture we’ve built and the footholds we make into each other, year over year, as our children change before our eyes.

We survived those early years of overwhelm and constant needs, but still we are deep into the kingdom of childhood, even though it’s the kingdom of tween/teendom these days.

I have so much fun with my kids, and really I hate to leave them. Every time I say goodbye feels like the last time I’ll ever see them. The first day away is physically painful, and I have a hard time functioning.

But it’s essential for me to get away, in part to remind myself that I won’t be in their kingdom forever. I will have lives upon lives after this childrearing period, and that is a tragedy, yes, and it is a happy ending, too.

Already, we are (way) more than halfway to an empty nest. But we are not birds who must hover over our eggs at all times to keep them warm, even though it feels like it.

Maybe it’s good to practice leaving our nest when it’s still full so we’ll know how to do it.

Maybe it’s good to show ourselves the parts we might love about it.

Maybe it's good to take a look at ourselves without them now and then.

Abandoning my routine for four days helped me notice the things that stayed.

The most obvious constant is my husband, and for me in this moment that is a very good thing.

But I’m a little conflicted about this.

In order to counteract the narrative that’s constantly shoved down young girls’ throats, I tell my daughters that romantic love shouldn’t be the central goal of their lives, that marriage alone will not be enough to sustain them, that there’s so much wrong with the fairy tale sold to women to keep us toiling in cis-het relationships.

I want so much more for my kids than being good wives and good mothers (and good daughters), even as these roles have given me much joy and fulfillment.

I have regrets from my own young years, especially my youngest years as a mother, when I didn’t know how to advocate for myself or even that I should advocate for myself in a society that taught me how to be a grown-up in grade school but left that optional for my husband for a long time, maybe forever if I hadn’t demanded otherwise.

It was essential for me to be up all night with our babies, but he couldn’t do it. It was good for me to abandon my career and stay home with our children, but he shouldn’t.

It was fine and necessary for every aspect of my identity and life to revolve around our children’s needs while he played a supporting role in this great project we undertook together.

Luckily for me, but also because of me, he figured it out and we are still here together. We are happy here together, so much happier than we were as puppies on our honeymoon or in our early adulthood without real responsibilities, or in those whirlwind baby years.

Maybe we are in the golden age of our marriage. I’m so glad I stopped to notice.

Our getaway also gave me a chance to take stock of who I am right now, not so much when I was away from my regularly scheduled life, but since returning to it.

I’ve spent the last year and a half adjusting to this strange, mercurial chronic illness, through shifting diagnoses and understandings of outcomes, through pills and injections and sensors and pumps.

I’ve been riding on adrenaline and fumes through this part I’m good at, the emergency part, the reactive part, the survival part.

I think our trip helped me realize I’ve transitioned into the part I’m not so good at, the maintenance phase, the taking stock phase, the “holy shit this is the way it’ll be forever or at least until they start distributing the bio-pancreases that have been just around the corner for decades” phase.

Since hitting my body hard about two years ago, adult-onset Type 1 Diabetes has already robbed me of so many of my plans and made it so much harder for me to function, and my husband has stepped up into many of the spaces I’ve had to leave in our shared life.

(Others have remained empty or unfinished, like the three books that reside on my computer, waiting for their writer to return. But more on that in a minute. )

I am grateful and angry and disappointed about how much change the disease has wrought, and every moment feels so much more precious and beautiful, but so much less certain.

I’m sadder, and I’m happier. I’m braver, but I’m so scared.

I savor my friendships and community more than ever, while being more aware of my aloneness.

I am as alive as the great trees reaching above my head on that mountain, and as temporary as their felled companions mulching the forest floor.

A storm could take me down in an instant, or I could be here another 200 years. But even giants don’t live forever.

Even if I hadn’t gotten sick, if my life hadn’t unfolded in this way, this midpoint would certainly have been a time to reflect on life’s uncertainty.

This is the time to realize nothing is guaranteed, and the obstacles are going to keep on coming. They’ll probably keep getting bigger and bigger, and honestly, a lot less cute. Nursing my babies sure was sweeter than pricking myself with needles all day long.

Even though I’m stronger and wiser and more myself in so many ways, I’m also so much more brittle and delicate.

So, okay, things aren’t going at all how I expected, but I had plans for this life, and I still do. As I come to terms with my fragility, I’m learning a different way of being with myself.

I won’t be able to finish my books on sheer grit and mettle, on powering through on adrenaline and fumes. It might have been easier that way, but that rushing phase of my life is over. I can’t do that anymore.

I’m realizing I need to move into a new phase of my creativity, one that looks familiar but that I haven’t seen in a long time. It’s time to pull my writing and my strength from a place of joy and play, a place where time doesn’t exist.

I’ve gotten so good at deadlines and timelines, at guilting and shaming myself into sacrificing now on a promise of future gain. But when I was little, I wrote from a simpler place and I lived in a simpler place. Storytelling was the way I understood other people and myself. There were no timers or word counts or industry research.

I didn’t need to “be” a writer in order to feel like my life mattered. I was a writer, and it didn’t ever mean any more or less than that.

Writing was about the questions I had about why people do the things they do, and how they get through the hard parts. It was the way I sought to understand what mattered about human existence, and it still is.

Here from the ridge of my life, looking out at the view before I start the walk back down, I want to write and live the way I did when I was little — from a place of curiosity and hope that had nothing to do with the ego boost that would have come from making it big or even finishing a novel.

Whenever I can, I want to hold still long enough to capture a snapshot with my words. That was enough for little me, and even with all of the big, adult things I’ve faced in my life, it’s still who I am.

Maybe it doesn’t matter if it isn’t always good.

Maybe it doesn’t matter what comes of it.

Nothing is permanent but I am here and you are, too. Thank you sitting with me in this moment and reading these words.