No one prepares you for the isolation of first and early motherhood. You are deeply lonely, yet never alone. I thought of it as being dropped down a well with a baby.
Down in this well of mine and Lu’s, when she woke up to nurse at night (which she did A LOT), I would rock us in the green glider, sure we were the only souls awake on Earth. I would look at her, attached to my body, six inches between her face and mine. “It’s just you and me, kid,” I’d say, marveling at her in the moonlight. She was my loneliness, my joy, my wellmate, and my teacher.
We were both novices: me at being a mother, her at being alive. We learned how to be… together, awkwardly.
In the blink of an eye, six inches became 1,368 miles. We said our final goodbyes yesterday in Ann Arbor. She turned away from us toward some friends waiting to walk to the stadium to take their freshman class picture. The last I saw of her, she was in a clutch of blue-and-maize-clad new friends. She waved. I waved. And she was off to be a novice again, this time without me.
I said a benediction on her head as it bobbed away with the crowd: It’s just you, kid. And I know she’ll be okay.
Me? I am not okay. A mom on the shuttle from the rental car place asked me if I’d just dropped a kid off at college (did the UMich tee and the tears give me away?). The bartender at the Sky Lounge patted my hand.
I can’t stop crying. I am devastated. But it’s a happy thing. We did this on purpose, worked for it even. I can’t remember this confusion of joy and sadness since…she was born.