Z will be home for the summer in one week. Okay, more like eight days, but soon. Eight more days before I hear him laughing and talking animatedly with his friends about video game strategy late into the night; before I need to add salsa, pistachios, peanuts, mozzarella cheese, premade pizza shells, jarred tomato sauce, and Earl Gray tea to my shopping list; before I see him venturing out with over-ear headphones on for a walk to the local convenience store; before he wears his track into the floor as he paces waiting for his tea water to boil or pizza to cook. Before he is home.
He is one exam period away from finishing his first year of college.
He made it.
And somehow, so did I.
It is easy to say now that of course he did. Most kids do. But some don’t. And some do, but with a lot of difficulty and challenges and heartache. And it isn’t always something you can predict or see coming. You send that young adult out into the world, fingers crossed, breath held, and you hope and hope that they will find their way, their people, their stride. Z and his classmates were kids whose high school experience was entirely interrupted by COVID. They got to March of their first year in high school and then everything changed. The ways in which those pandemic years affected our kids’ development aren’t things that we can easily parse out. Z is social and loud and engaged with his friends, but he is quiet and shy and somewhat reserved with people he doesn’t know. How COVID intensified this or interrupted him growing in different ways I can’t say for sure. Maybe at some point, when he is older and thinking back on his experience during the pandemic, he will have thoughts on it. But for now, I don’t think he would have a lot to say about it aside from how much it interrupted his robotics experience and took away his ability to participate in the foreign exchange program at his high school.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fba1cdb56-79e8-4cd1-a0e9-75a0ca3e4935_1600x1200.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff72b85e6-5997-4b26-bbc7-3679edd2cbd2_2048x1536.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_474,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff47bb18d-e63c-4436-b034-4b9e11ffce6c_3504x2336.jpeg)
When Z was a newborn, I spent several precious hours watching him sleep. I was afraid he might forget to breathe, you see, so I had to keep constant watch. At some point, I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore and he survived and I learned how to trust that he would breathe on his own. I had a lot of very strong opinions about how I was going to mother this baby. (My husband may describe them as rather inflexible rules, but as I said earlier, I had one way of approaching life: striving.) I had been preparing for mothering since I was very young. I always wanted to have children and spent much of my tween and teen years caring for other people’s children. My first paid babysitting job was when I was 11. When I was in high school, I spent a summer babysitting five children for 40+ hours a week. I was the oldest of seven children. So I had plenty of opportunities to think about how I wanted to mother. My strongest influences were my own mother and my aunt. My mom had had seven unmedicated births, exclusively breastfed all of us, and just generally loved babies. My aunt had three home births, exclusively breastfed her babies, wore her babies, used cloth diapers. When those three babies got older, she worked in a birth center. And when my first baby was born, she was there alongside my mom and D, supporting me in my neverending labor.
I was the first among my friends to have a baby. I didn’t have a community around me that was parenting in similar ways or parenting at all. My birth classes were several towns away, so I didn’t go to any of the baby groups that came out of those classes. My sister had her first baby just five weeks before Z was born. We talked daily, sometimes multiple times in a day. We shared very similar parenting styles—cloth diapering our babies, wearing them in wraps when they were tiny and Ergo carriers when they got older, soothing them when they cried whatever the hour, keeping them with us always. But she was more than 2,000 miles away. Community can soften the worries, help you to know that babies will breathe while they sleep, even if you aren’t watching them. That having your four-month old on your lap while the TV is on will not cause irreparable damage. And while I had many women I could call and talk with, I didn’t have a community of other moms physically near me. And I’m old enough that internet groups weren’t quite there yet.
Significant stressors were happening around me at that time. I spent hours on the phone trying to figure out how to get support to a family member who was facing some serious challenges. My sister and I cried together many times in our phone calls about whether or not things would turn out okay for our loved one (they did and that person is thriving and life has been good to them). And D had his own difficult family situations to manage. On top of this, I was still a graduate student, working on my dissertation, teaching, and serving as the project director for a community organization.
With so many things feeling out of my control, I doubled down on the things that felt controllable to me: working on my dissertation and being the best mother I could be. But that push to be as close to perfect as I could, to be the best, well, it also brought with it a lot of anxiety about the many times when I didn’t live up to my own stupidly high expectations. My striving for perfection, to hold true to these ideals I had set for myself, lead to more and more anxiety, more and more feelings of failing.
When I look back at those first 18 months of Z’s life, my first feelings are of the joy and delight in watching a human emerge from those first, sleepy few weeks to smiles and coos and movement and words and mobility. It is hard to articulate the awe that I felt watching Z grow and change and figure out that he could affect his world. I get teary even now as I think back to my babies and those first years of discovery and wonder. But behind these tender memories is the memory of myself, pushed to the edge of exhaustion and sanity by my own standards.
I worried so very much that I wasn’t doing everything I should for this tiny person I had brought into this world. That after years of being ahead of schedule and performing at the top of my abilities in grad school, I was falling behind my classmates. And that worry had a significant cost to my own well being.
At some point, I started to trust that I didn’t have to work quite so hard, worry quite so much, and that things would be okay. We bought a house and moved further outside of the city. The first day we moved in, we met neighbors a few doors down with a little one just a week older than Z. And suddenly, I wasn’t trying to figure out the mama thing on my own anymore. I had a friend. And that first warm day, when she came outside with popsicles for our littles, I knew that my decision not to allow Z to have sugar was about to end. Because sharing a popsicle with his new friend was so much more important than not having sugar. Because I trusted that she was a great mama making good decisions for her little one. Maybe I didn’t have all the answers all the time. OF COURSE, I didn’t have all the answers, all the time. She had many of them. Together, however, we definitely had them all. We met more neighbors, we built a community. And while many hard times were still ahead, it no longer felt like we were shouldering them alone.
It is easy to let anxiety fill in the transition points. To worry that when my boy—who is a young man in the eyes of everyone but his mama—goes off to college any number of hard things could befall him. I won’t indulge my worry mind with listing those things. (I am sure your worry mind can do that easily for you.) To worry that as my second boy, who has always been social and outgoing, pushes hard against the boundaries of teenage life that he will push too hard and fall into another list of problematic behaviors and scenarios that parents’ worry minds can concoct in seconds. Over the past year, I have indulged both of these worries at times. And it has done me no good. It has prevented nothing. It has saved my beloved young men from zero bad situations. It has caused me insomnia, upset stomach, frustration, rumination, anxiety, WORRY.
And so, I have resolved over the past few months, to let go of that worry. To no longer invite it in. To no longer indulge its tendency to push past my closed door, to over stay its welcome, to steamroll my best efforts to politely say no thank you. To not let it taint what I know and love and trust about these young men I have raised up from babies. To not let it hide beneath the awe and wonder and delight I feel in being their mother and getting a front row seat in the production of their lives.
My first baby boy went off to college. And he is coming home a changed young man. My middle child is living his best life. And making mistakes. And also doing things that make me so proud my heart could burst. My youngest child loves to be home. And also does theater and makes beautiful glass art outside of this house. They are my pride and joy, my heart outside my body, my world.
And hard things are going to come. Maybe in five years, maybe in ten. Maybe next month, next week, or tomorrow. But worrying will not change that. It will only rob me of the ability to see all the beauty right here, today.
The imperfect, messy loveliness of life.
The gift of human connection.
The privilege of mothering.
Comfort
When everyone has gone to sleep
And you are wide awake.
There’s no-one left to tell your troubles to.
Just an hour ago
You listened to their voices,
Lilting like a river over underground.
And the light from downstairs
Came up soft like daybreak,
Dimly like the heartache of a lonely child.And if you can't remember
a better time,
You can have mine, little one.In days to come,
When your heart feels undone;
May you always find an open hand
And take comfort wherever you can.And oh, it's a strange place
And oh, everyone with a different face.
But just like you thought when you stopped here to linger,
We're only as separate as your little fingers.So cry, why not?
We all do.
Then turn to the one you love.
And smile a smile that lights up all the room.
And follow your dreams,
in through every out door..
It seems that’s what we're here for.And when you can't remember
A better time,
You can have mine. little one.In days to come,
When your heart feels undone;
May you always find an open hand.
And take comfort, there is comfort.
Take comfort wherever you can.~Deb Talan
All photos were taken by the exceptional Dana Giuliana, unless otherwise noted.
Thanks for spending some of your day reading this post. I hope it resonated. Periplum of motherhood and other wonderings is free. If you enjoy reading, please subscribe and share it with friends!