I cannot express to you how relieved we are to be reaching the end of the year.
No, I know. It’s August but, in our minds, our helluva year started August 28, 2024 when Rich’s mother suddenly died. We had just dropped our youngest child off to his first year at college and were looking forward to empty nesting when our world was turned upside down.
That day was the kick-off to what would be months of chaos, confusion, and a calendar that seemed to offer an emotion-of-the-day. We naively thought that shifting the kids to and from their respective colleges for services would be the most challenging part of our 2024 fall season but it turned out that closing down someone’s life was the real doozy. We had only just finished the bulk of that, with the sale of my mother-in-law’s house, when the next gut punch arrived with the death of my mother.
While that was expected (and perhaps a relief), it nonetheless left that emotional faucet flowing at full force.
Saturday marked six months since my mother died. It seems like a blink and also so long ago.
Thursday will mark a year since Rich’s mother died. It seems like a blink and also so long ago.
We continue to have moments during which we reach for our phones to tell our mothers something whether it be big news or to request advice or to simply check in.
We continue to have pauses where we look at each other and say, “I can’t believe my mother is gone. It doesn’t even seem real.”
And it doesn’t seem real, even as the months tick by.
It has been a long year.
We do see August 28th as a beacon. On August 28th, we’ll have made it through a whole year. We made it this far, at least.
When we dropped our youngest off last weekend, Rich and I both felt this weird mix of doom and delight. As it was just after we’d dropped him off last year that the first shoe dropped, there was a natural gurgle of PTSD. Would this year be okay? Was there a surprise just around the corner? Could we finally lean into empty nesting? Could everyone just be cool and…stay alive?
Be cool, everyone. Let’s all just be cool.
On our pseudo-New Year’s Day, we will point ourselves towards the Arctic Circle as we finally check “Alaska” off of our bucket list. It is a trip that has been three years in the making and was originally meant to check “Denali” off my mother-in-law’s bucket list. It is a trip that has been postponed twice (see all of the above) and we have been slow to believe that it would ever really happen but I think it is actually going to happen.
What was once going to be a large group adventure has dwindled to a small group adventure and I believe it is the most perfect group of all.
This is typically when I hear from people with kind(ish) notes that include a blurb of “It must be nice.”
Thank you, yes, it is nice. We work really, really hard so that we can play hard, too. While I am both a travel planner and writer, there is not as much glamour as you might think there is. I hustle. In order to truly check out, I have been clickity-clacking like mad for the last two weeks in order to get all bookings and freelance articles completed through September. It is nice, yes, but it does come with a prize when your employee roster only has one name on it and that name is yours.
Speaking of kind(ish) notes, should we do a little housekeeping? Yes, let’s.
I do get emails or direct messages quite often from readers seeking advice as a stepmother, wife, regular mother, writer, travel, etc. I often wonder if the sender meant to reach out to me and I truly hope I never get over the tingles of imposter syndrome that come with these notes.
I consider myself fortunate not to get many notes of criticism but they do come occasionally. I rarely respond directly as I worry that, in most cases, the sender wouldn’t understand a response that included actual punctuation or proper use of grammar.
As a semi-public figure, I do understand how easy it might be for readers to assume they know all there is to know about me but…no. What ends up on paper is not the whole of what happens within the walls of our home nor is it the summary of my relationships. It is a blurb, nothing more, though all true. Topics that might be questionable? Those are well-vetted within our home’s four walls before being published. Some topics are uncomfortable, yes, but that doesn’t make them any less important.
I find it interesting when complete strangers come to my workplace to tell me how to do my job or to offer a list of opinions about me after having exactly zero actual interactions with me.
Yes, I understand that, as a writer, I do live under the umbrella of “public presence” but still…it’s weird, right? To me, it screams of too much free time, among other things. I typically let the comments of direct messages slide because they are just the price of having public pages. However, when someone takes the time to track me down on my personal pages, well, then we have a problem.
Quick PSA written for a particular audience: if you are under the age of forty and you find my blurbs confusing or offensive there is a reason for that you are not in my focal demographic and i would not expect you to understand the message behind the message because these excerpts are not for you and while i appreciate the concern about my lack of likes well this is awkward but those in my focal demographic including me don’t really give a shit about likes which is bliss and there are about a bajillion other metrics that tell me exactly how i am doing and my 35 journalism degree has been quite useful in tracking those and maybe that’s where i should have started: If my journalism degree is older than you, you’re on the wrong feed, bless your heart.
Please, Lord, do not send another millennial my way. I cannot handle the gibberish.