Lost soul in transit

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, parental responsibility

In one way, and mainly just this one, Catherine Goldhammer and I are alike: neither of us knows what we want to be when we grow up. This takes a bit of reading between the lines, but it is there in her book Winging It: Dispatches from an (Almost) Empty Nest. She begins and ends the book at almost the same place: her daughter Harper is a year from finishing High School and leaving for college.

In the midst, time is a fluid thing, as the author ruminates over her own life and her "misspent youth" (it was), her life with this young woman she bore and now admires, her marriage to Thomas, who remains a good friend in divorce. She makes much of her own uncertainty about who she really is, about just how to "get on with life" as her daughter leaves home.

A child's leave-taking isn't some simple event, a now-here-now-gone. They begin to leave when they begin to walk, when they won't take "No" for an answer but expect us to, the first time they stay with a friend, or go on an overnight class trip, or attend a multi-week summer symposium. By the time a child actually takes up residence elsewhere (you can take it from me), it is a relief to see them just go and be done with it.

Our own son, a week away from starting his Junior year at a college a couple hours away, has so far not left for more than two months at a time. He was home all last summer and half of this one. He plans to take enough summer coursework this coming year to be gone all but a week or two. My wife and I are getting used to being "just a couple" again, with chaotic interludes.

For Ms Goldhammer, much of this is still ahead; Harper is accepted at her first-choice university but hasn't yet moved when the book winds down. The author also is still in an uncertain state, but is more at home with it. Having been herself tested, she is more certain of her place in her chosen home and town. She has gained the rootedness her child needs, so she can leave it behind, by further stages, until she is an "away" person who visits, rather than a "here" person who leaves from time to time. Little birds fly off one day and do not return. People are not birds.