I’ve got so much to do I can barely get started. In fact, I’ve got two loads of laundry going and I have been outside to look over the garden, but mostly I have sat on the couch reading The Ape in the Tree by Alan Walker, but apparently really by his wife, Pat Shipman. He writes about paleontology — he is a paleontologist — and his books are fascinating. I recently The Wisdom of the Bones which M was assigned for an anthropology class and that was fascinating, too.
I think part of my problem may be that when you get out of the sun it’s actually quite chilly. Somehow that’s making me reluctant to go outside and start digging, which is what I really need to do. I should also go to the farmer’s market and the library, but I really don’t want to.
We went to a solstice party last night which was quite fun, although in general I am opposed to going out on a Friday night when I really just want to come home and go to sleep. I ran into some people I knew when the kids were in high school. They are quite worried about their son, who also just graduated. He actually sounds just fine to me, but he has apparently defied parental guidance and is now unemployed in the city where he went to college (but not actually completely unemployed — more like underemployed). It makes me more pleased than ever that N figured out something to do all on her own. It’s socially beneficial (converting vacant city lots to community gardens and running nutritional programs and cooking classes), it covers her rent (rent is pretty cheap in Maine), she’s happy, and she arranged it all on her own — I don’t think I could ask for any more than that. It occurs to me that I am really proud of her for figuring it all out, and really proud of myself for raising such a successful kid. Yay us!
I am actually really proud of myself for realizing that success for her was going to be on her own terms, too — something that I think might help these other parents if they could only see it. It’s something I’ve always aspired to as a parent, but which is not always easy in practice, and I think I have to attribute some of the fact that her idea of success in this case actually does comport with my idea of success to sheer blind good fortune, but I don’t care — I’ll take it.
I’m still breathing a long sigh of relief that we got one through college and she seems to be launched and doing well. I just knocked on wood. It’s not anything you can really take for granted, all the while you have to go along acting if it’s the most normal and unremarkable thing in the world — of course your child will turn out okay! It’s just an extension of the feeling you have when they’re born — that having a child is like suddenly having your heart walking around exposed in the world without you. I imagine it will feel like that as long as I’m alive.
But I guess it’s okay to revel, quietly, in having made it this far.
Gulp.