Embracing every phase.🌒🌓🌔🌕
Embrace every phase.
I was having a great weekend alone, despite the clementines.
I reported to my girlfriends over a plate of avocado toast at lunch on Saturday that the food shopping trip to Wegman’s I’d just returned from had been dicier than expected. “When was the last time you went food shopping for yourself?” I asked the three women, who were each married and had children in their late teens/early 20s.
Up until yesterday, I'm not sure if I’d ever gone to a grocery store to shop for myself. When I lived with a high school friend for a year after college, I don’t even know what we ate but it didn’t come from a grocery store. Not long after, I was engaged at 23 and hot to play house with my soon-to-be-husband and went grocery shopping with his needs in mind.
It hit me when I walked through the automatic doors at Wegman’s on Saturday morning when I was confronted with the long line of shopping carts, where I hesitated and debated which size to grab. I quickly picked the smaller option, one that I normally do not choose. I passed a display of bagged avocadoes and reached my hand out to check their ripeness before I remembered I could never get through five of them by myself before they all went brown and mushy.
I strolled past long tables overflowing with fresh berries and bins full of Honeycrisp apples – former staples of my food shopping run, and made a beeline to the shelves of bananas, ripping a bunch in half. That’s when I saw them, out of the corner of my eye, piled at the end of a table laden with every type of citrus fruit you could imagine and some bizarre-looking ones I never even knew were a thing.
I’m not even sure when clementines are in season and nowadays, it doesn’t even seem to matter. But lately, I’d been having a hard time finding clementines, which my youngest child loves. I’d slice the bag of netting open and dump them into my big wooden IKEA bowl and leave them on the marble kitchen counter for him to pick at whenever he walked by. He’d stop and eat one over the sink, dropping the peels into the disposal and popping the sweet slices into his mouth, filling me in on whatever was on his mind. His latest workout routine or some friend drama. Later, I’d run the water and push the citrus rinds down the drain, flipping the garbage disposal switch to smell the sweetness of the fruit long after my son had walked away.
Recently, I’d grabbed a bag of small blood oranges at Trader Joe’s for my 18-year-old, thinking maybe they’d be just as good as clementines – they looked exactly the same. But my son reported after eating about half of them that they weren’t all that great and they sat in the bowl until I finally tossed them in the trash.
So when I saw the bags of clementines piled up at Wegman's on Saturday, my first thought was, “FINALLY.” And then I remembered.
***
I moved the youngest of my four children into his freshman dorm last Monday. His sister and I made his bed and organized his Tide pods and body spray into all the plastic bins we’d grabbed at Wal-Mart and after a quick lunch at Chik-Fil-A, it was time to say good-bye.
I think my son was excited for us to lose it. He kept making dramatic statements as if he was going off to war and not living on a college campus an easy four-hour drive from our home in New Jersey. I think he wanted to see me cry in particular (his sister cries all the time). He’s heard the legendary story about how hard I sobbed in a parking garage after saying goodbye to that crybaby sister and has seen the pic of how emotional I was to leave his older brother 10 years earlier.
But I’m so happy for my youngest to go to college after a long senior year at home and feeling isolated. And frankly, I’m excited about my new chapter as well, with my three older kids all out of college and living off on their own. And not for nothing, it’s not like my 18-year-old and I were spending tons of time together. It’s not like my he was sitting down and asking me what I thought about Afghanistan or the Bennifer reunion. He spent most of his time working out, hanging with friends, or up in his room looking at a screen.
I gave him a big hug goodbye and told him to make good decisions and drove home. I dropped my daughter off at an Amtrak station to head back to Philly and I arrived home to a dog very happy to see me. It’s still not very different from when my son was here except the cleaning women were here this week and now whenever I walk by his room, I’m greeted by a freshly made bed. But it’s still weird going to bed and waking up in an empty house after almost 30 years of tiptoeing around somebody else’s sleep schedule.
***
Seeing those clementines piled on the table at Wegman’s really made clear the change in my recent circumstances. I could feel the pricks of tears behind my eyes as I surveyed the entire produce section at Wegman’s, which suddenly became a horror show of memories: giant plastic clamshells of arugula and big bags of bok choy, the family-sized bags of baby Yukon gold potatoes. All the oversized portions of produce I’d load up on during my weekly haul, knowing it would all be gone in days.
It didn’t get much better as I turned left into the bakery and had to avoid eye contact with the plastic containers of chocolate chip cookies and brownies, staples in my junk drawer for years. As I passed the cases of pastries – croissants and bagels and crumb cakes – I impulsively pulled a sheet of waxed paper out of the nearby box and grabbed a peach muffin that had caught my eye. It had a big, flat top that looked crispy and was covered in chunks of raw sugar and I thought it would be a yummy treat with my coffee on my first solo Sunday morning.
Later that afternoon, my oldest son texted to say his plans had changed last minute and wondered whether he could crash at my place for the night. While I was running errands, he and his girlfriend had stopped at my place to drop off his bag before heading out to dinner. When I got home, I busied myself addressing things around the house I’d allowed to languish all summer: I replaced burnt-out lightbulbs and dead batteries and rehung a picture in the living room whose Command strips had given out, causing the framed print to slide off the wall, where it sat for months
I’d bought two new record albums at Barnes & Noble that afternoon to play on my turntable, which I listened to at full volume while I organized my vast collection of water bottles in my pantry and moved furniture around in my living room, enjoying having the whole house to myself. While I was setting up a new Nespresso machine my daughter had given me for my birthday, I noticed that the muffin bag was missing from the wire rack where I’d placed it when I unloaded my groceries earlier in the day.
“Did you eat my muffin?” I texted my son, who quickly responded that he had and he’d Venmo me for it.
I responded in all caps that it was not about the money and he asked if this was really "an all-caps situation" and I confirmed that it was indeed. Then I spent the night feeling so angry that my 28-year-old would just go ahead and help himself to something that was not his.
When we finally spoke about it the next morning, I asked him what he had been thinking, and he said he just assumed I’d bought a bag full of muffins and that it was not a big deal. To him, things were still business-as-usual over here: Mom goes out and gets everything that fills the pantry and refrigerator, the wire basket of fruit next to the sink. And the kids could help themselves to anything they wanted. It’s just how it’s always been.
I explained to him that things were different now. He needed to consider how he’d feel if I stopped by his East Village studio and helped myself to whatever was sitting around. I told him that the all-you-can-eat-buffet policy at my house had officially expired.
***
It’s funny how I can be both things at once: sad not to have anyone living at home to food shop for anymore and pissed that someone ate my peach muffin. It's hard sometimes to let go of what was and embrace what is. My content team at work gave me a mug for my birthday that reads "Embrace every phase," with tiny pics of the moon in different stages along the inside of the rim. It reminds me that we're always moving through different stages, whether we know it or not -- and sometimes whether we even want to or not -- waxing and waning with the changing rhythms of our lives.
This new stage of my life is beginning with what the writer Anne Lamott calls “radical self-love." I'm taking time to think about who I really am and what brings me joy. I’m setting boundaries and embracing my solitude. I'm going grocery shopping and thinking about what I want, and not the needs of four other people.
And on a Saturday night, I'm listening to my Purple Rain album that the rest of my family hates at full blast, the light of my moon waxing bright as I dance alone in the living room.
SUNDAY SHARES: Read, watch, cook, buy
White Lotus, anyone? I was really busy hating absolutely everyone when I was not busy staring at Connie Britton's arms. Damn.
I shared this podcast with, like, 10 people after a friend sent it to me. It's long but there are so many good nuggets from Anne Lamott about writing, spirituality, and sobriety that I could listen to it 10 more times.
If you're local, I stopped by Trademark in Little Silver where they have a great selection right now of tops and jackets from ZSupply and a couple of other cute things I picked up with work and a late-summer getaway in mind. Things come and go there quickly so it's worth checking in every once in a while to see what's new.
I love this single-mom-move-kid-into-college-energy, which I support.