It happened the day I dropped my son off at college. I had just left his dorm and pulled my truck into a gas station to fill up the tank before starting out on the 200 plus mile drive back to Hampton, Georgia.  I opened the door to get out and as soon as my left foot stepped onto the running board, I felt my heart being ripped out of my chest.

I had not cried at all the week leading up to the drop off. I didn’t shed a tear on the trip down to Valdosta, nor during lunch before Najee and I made our way on campus. I did not cry as I unpacked the kitchen and bathroom supplies for his dorm room. When I gave Najee a hug outside of the dorm after deciding that I had reached the balance I had intended (not leaving him at the curb with all of his stuff and not staying long enough to scrub out all of the kitchen and bathroom cabinets as I so desperately wanted), I did not shed a single tear. But that first step out of my truck knowing that I would be leaving my son in a matter of minutes broke me in half: I cried the first 100 miles of the return trip; stopping at the half way point between Najee’s school and home.

Once I was on the interstate, I decided to cry as much as I needed, for as long as I needed. I used the hand towel I’d brought to defend myself against the mid-August, South Georgia heat to catch my tears. The tears were accompanied by crazy, outrageous thoughts that, miraculously, opened my mind and heart to the three elements of love.

The thoughts clawed their way up and out of my subconscious from the oldest part of the human brain that scientists (and Martha Beck) often refer to as the reptilian or reactive brain. My reptilian brain is a decidedly dark, wretched place. My most horrible, ridiculous fears live there. When my rational brain is not at the top of its game, creepy, terrifying thoughts climb-up to the surface, kick open the door to my reality then finger paint images of fear all over it. As I merged onto the interstate, my reactive mind berated me for dropping my son off on a deserted island to fend for himself. Did I mention that in my reptilian brain Najee was three and not eighteen? I honestly felt I was abandoning him.

I can’t recall how long this train of thought continued, but I do remember my conscious mind challenging the bizarre fantasy my reactive brain was steadily constructing. The vision of  my small child alone on an island hunting his own food and fighting alligators simply wasn’t true. It was a lie. My rational brain told me the truth: I had taken my son as far as I could take him; college represented the bridge from childhood to adulthood and I couldn’t go on that journey with him. The truth was that our love was not ending, just changing. When I opened my heart to this truth, the first element of love came to me.

Love is trust. It is tested, challenged; even battered trust. I realized that I could not profess to love my son if I did not trust him and trust myself. I had to trust how I had raised him, and the foundation I gave him to be a productive contributor to society. I had to trust that Najee would remember his morals, his sense of integrity, and his humanity. I had to trust that he would carry himself like the Southern gentleman he had been raised to be. After all, there would have been no reason to put in the work and time I had over the last eighteen years if I didn’t trust the outcomes. If I didn’t trust Najee to be the man I raised him to be my efforts were a waste of time and had nothing to do with love.

These new thoughts slowed my tears and halted the threat of hyperventilation. But, my reactive brain struck again as my breathing normalized. The next thought that flashed across the screen in my head was: He doesn’t need me anymore. That turned out to be an enormous lie. The day after I took him to college, Najee and I spent hours on the phone.  I helped him buy books, complete financial aid paperwork, and find his mailbox number so I could send him the bath towels he’d left at home. And then there was the check that I wrote for the balance of his tuition the following week. So, I can state emphatically that my son does indeed still need me. But as the miles towards home sped by the, “he doesn’t need me” lie danced around my head and called up the tears—actually sobs—once again. Luckily, my conscious mind had not retreated. It came out of its solitary corner, smiling softly and offering quiet, none dramatic relief: My son and I are in transition. We are moving out of the traditional parent-child stage of our relationship into the adult-friendship phase. My role now is to provide guidance. That doesn’t mean fix everything or come up with all the answers. It does mean being available and asking the questions that may not have occurred to Najee so that he can get to the answers on his own. While Najee was growing up, I was the caretaker of his life. Now my job is to stand in the background while he learns to manage his own life. I was not prepared for how difficult the transition would be. Click here to read Part 2.

-Melissa Brown Levine
www.melissabrownlevine.com

After eighteen years of taking care of every aspect of my child’s life, the act of handing over the reins resulted in the heart ache I experienced at the gas station in Valdosta. My mind had always known this time would come, but my heart had been pretending to be tough and ready to be out of the full-time parenting business. Real love hurts sometimes. And as my rational brain reminded me: Children leave home and parents are left behind. It is a natural part of life. The second element of love, acceptance, is the key to surviving that transition.

My eyes began to dry as I neared the rest stop where I would take my only break. I didn’t want to scare anyone, so I made the effort to pull myself together before taking the ramp and exiting my truck. Fortunately, my conscious mind offered more real talk: You can’t control what happens to Najee now. You simply have to accept what comes. Now, I’ve only just learned how to do acceptance over the last three years. And I’ll admit that I mostly suck at it. But I decided to challenge myself in this area. If I could learn to live as a single woman, content with my life then surely I could learn to accept that my son is in college, and I don’t get to baby him anymore. I expect to cross the line and be pushed back into my new place with an exasperated, “I got this,” from Najee, but I‘m pretty adept at self -monitoring, so I think I’ll be able to manage myself okay.

At the rest stop, I splashed water on my face and took several deep breaths. When I got back in the truck, there was an uplifting text message on my phone from a friend who had asked me if I was okay before I left Valdosta. I’d responded with a panicked declaration of my complete aloneness. After being married and divorced twice and raising Najee alone for several years, for the first time in my adult life, I was literally on my own. It was pretty scary to accept that. What was I supposed to do with my maternal instinct now? It had only stopped hounding me for another child during Najee’s last year of high school as all of the stress and the money and the expectations and the money (did I say that already) built up. After Najee’s senior year broke me, I began to look forward to having an empty nest. But the reality of it made me wonder what I would do with myself (even though I have a full-time job, continuous freelance work, and a series of novels, a stage play and a screen play to write). The thing is, I had started missing Najee weeks before I took him to school just as I always did before he would go away for the summer to visit his father. I hadn’t given myself permission to surrender to the sadness, so it all came out on my drive home.

I think surrender is the most difficult element of love. No one likes to. You can feel weak and small when you do it. But when you let go, when you surrender your defenses and your ego, we can experience the awesome power of love: all of its beauty and strength. Yes, it hurts to let go, but only because our muscles are cramped from holding up our flimsy defenses for so long. Once we put them down, yeah it will hurt, but the pain will eventually subside.

I surrendered to the pain of leaving Najee all of three and a half hours away from home as I reached Macon, just forty-five minutes from Hampton. When I surrendered to my anguish, I found relief. Fighting our emotions contributes to the pain we experience during life transitions like the emptying of the nest. When I stopped fighting, my tears stopped flowing. By the time I pulled into my driveway, I was calm and tired, but at ease.

The crying didn’t end that day, but my subsequent episodes were not over-the-top dramatizations of losing or abandoning my son. My tears were simply a short response to missing my child. Najee was doing what he was supposed to be doing with his life. Ironically, the morning after my Valdosta to Hampton journey I learned that one of my essays was accepted for publication. It served as a reminded that while Najee was making a major life adjustment in college, I was also doing what I was supposed to be doing with my own life. And as long as I continue to trust, accept, and surrender to our love, we will both be just fine.

-Melissa Brown Levine
www.melissabrownlevine.com

“I’ll have to call you back.”

It was a Friday night, and I was parked at my kitchen table trying to make a 10:00 pm deadline. My freelance writing gig of the moment was composing encyclopedia articles about historical events like World War II, the holocaust, and 9/11. When the phone rang I was in the middle of finishing my last article for the week. I was half way to my minimum word count and still had to edit the article when I answered the phone. It was my friend of four years who I will call Deana. She’d called to vent. And since I had learned how to multitask during my eighteen years of parenting, I cradled the phone to my ear as I typed on my laptop and I was only semi panicked as Deana began to recount the events of her day. I had about three hours to complete my assignment, but for a tired part-time writer who had already given someone else eight hours out of her day and forty hours out of her week, it felt like I only had thirty minutes to write, polish and submit my work.

But this is what Deana and I did for each other. We took calls from each other at work, in rush hour traffic, and in the middle of grocery shopping. One weekends and holidays we would talk four or five times a day. This is how we took care of each other. Taking Deana’s calls (and her taking mine) had become a routine part of life for both of us. However, the subject of the conversation that Friday night had become a growing problem for me during the preceding months.

Deana and I met at the law firm where we’d both worked. Deana had already been at the firm for ten years when I was hired as a librarian. This was in 2008 at the crushing point of the Great Recession. Deana lost her job during the first round of staff lay-offs three months later. Fortunately she was given a few months of severance pay and later she qualified for unemployment. She also received financial support from her mother. Deana made the most of being unemployed for two years by returning to school and completing her bachelor’s degree.

On the surface, Deana appeared to have everything under control. She even initiated the loan modification process with her mortgage company. But every conversation I had with Deana revealed more of the crack that was expanding beneath the surface of her life. I learned that Deana continued to spend money as if she were working a full-time job. I heard about every sale and every item she purchased for herself and her then three-year-old son. When I found myself adjusting my budget to go out to the movies and dinner with Deana more often than our previous once a quarter outing, I pumped the brakes and made myself unavailable. When Deana would call and start talking about some new thing she was considering buying, like a gym membership when she had just purchased an elliptical a few weeks prior, I began to question her about her spending habits.

Friendship is delicate. It is different from any other relationship most people experience in their lifetimes. We tend to push family relations to the breaking point; but friendships are voluntary and even though many of us claim to have a desire for honesty from our closest friends (Deana often said this) when it is truth telling time, honesty can break the delicate ties that bind.

Two or three months before my last call with Deana, I began to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of her financial situation. As a single mother of a son who had just started college, I was dealing with my own financial challenges. It became difficult to listen to Deana rage about her stalled loan modification and brag about the new pair of shoes she’d just purchased. Deana has a lot of friends, but I got the impression that she was selective about what she shared with each of us. Until Deana’s final phone call, I had no idea just how bleak things were.

During the call, Deana told me about the break down she’d had earlier in the day while meeting with an account representative from her mortgage company. I typed as she talked. I listened intently as she revealed that the mortgage rep had spent several minutes silently reviewing her file. My typing slowed as Deana relayed the part of the conversation where the mortgage rep asked about her most recent forbearance. I stopped typing when she revealed that the house would go into foreclosure in two weeks. She had mentioned the pending foreclosure a week back, but somehow the exact date had not registered in my head; I thought she had more time. Deana ended her rant by saying, “So, I’m still in limbo,” after reporting that the mortgage rep had promised to contact her at the beginning of the next week to discuss her options.

I had spent the previous three months holding my tongue; at least with Deana. I vented to other friends about her situation to unload some of the burden I felt. Over the years, I had become aware of the frailty of my relationship with Deana because I had become aware of Deana’s personal frailties. In the past, I had taken verbal hits from Deana about my previous marriages and my decision to accept my introverted nature; I took the punches and I learned from them. But on the flip side, when I pushed back, I realized that Deana could dish out criticism with no problem but often choked when she was on the receiving end of critical observations. I kept my silence for two reasons. I was afraid of losing Deana. And I didn’t want my growing anger about her spending and dependence on her mother, even after she found a job, to lead me to hurt her feelings. When you are an adult who is solely responsible for your own household, hearing about a friend being frequently saved by her mother leaves a nasty taste in your mouth.

I was quiet for a while after Deana’s limbo comment. We had discussed her options in case the modification did not happen. Deana had started to look at rental properties during the weeks before the call. But she was dangerously close to the edge and simply needed to make a decision. I took a deep breath and said what was on my heart.

“You wouldn’t be in limbo if you’d just make the decision to leave the house.”  My tone was even, calm. My intent was to help her look honestly at her situation; it was not at all malicious. Deana responded in anger. She said I didn’t understand how she felt because I had never been faced with losing my house. That was true. But I had been divorced twice, so I knew something about starting over. And I knew that was the real fear Deana was struggling with. We went back and forth for a few minutes and then Deana ended the call with, “I’ll have to call you back.”

I haven’t heard from Deana since that call last September. And, no, I haven’t reached out to her. During the last four years, I have shed myself of people—friends, associates, even family members—who I realized I could not be honest with. The old Melissa would have gone out of her way to smooth things over with Deana just so I could continue to hold on to the relationship; but the new, revamped Melissa values honesty and openness in relationships above all else. So, my phone rings less now, but I have regained a lot of my personal time. The friends that remain in my life are as open to honesty—in both directions—as I am. 

The door to my relationship with Deana is firmly closed, now. But a new door has opened leading to more time for my writing and a new template for choosing who I will invite into my life in the future.

-Melissa Brown Levine
www.melissabrownlevine.com