It’s much foggier and damp feeling this early midsummer morning than I had imagined, though I could wait for the sun a bit longer, and there would still be a brief window in which to get in a quiet hour of biking before traffic picks up on Route 41, and before I’ll be needed at home. By a quarter to eight, I’ll be needed to wake up my 12-year-old son in preparation for taking him to Pittsfield for his third dentist appointment in as many weeks for the second application of some preventive stuff to keep three of his adult teeth from not fully rotting out.
The bad news about the state of those teeth had been delivered to me last month during his regular cleaning. I was immersed in emails at the time, perched on a waiting room cushion, when the hygienist appeared in the doorway and kidnapped my attention with, “Mom?” the sort of brusque, brief question that moms everywhere dread, the question that communicates the message, “You’ve really blown it, Mom.”
Dental-care monitoring. One more thing on the list of things I should have, might have, could have done better for him over the past few years. But in my defence, he’s nearly 13, the youngest of three kids, and his older sisters have not let me anywhere near their personal hygiene practices for a very long time. The supervision of teeth-brushing and flossing seem like just two more tasks for which a mom is at first totally essential, and then, all of a sudden, totally unnecessary. At some point, I figured my youngest child’s teeth just ceased to be my job and had fallen into the same defunct category as choosing his outfits, planning his playdates, and accompanying him on bike rides. How am I supposed to figure out the hundreds of points at which all the hundreds of mom jobs aren’t mine anymore?
It’s like I woke up on the 6,000th day of motherhood; put on my apron; made French toast for breakfast; filled three lunch boxes with nutritious things; called for the kids; and, when they failed to respond, discovered each bed empty because they had left for the day ages ago, having made their own breakfasts, sorted out their backpacks, and transported themselves wherever they needed to go.
Actually, it’s not like that at all. That’s how I wish it had gone. Then I could have become irrelevant all at once. It would have been a clean pulling off of the motherhood band aid. Instead, it has been an excruciatingly slow process of pulling off the band aid fiber by fiber, one fiber per day.
With my oldest, nearly 17, the process is just about complete. The most common reason my first baby speaks to me now is to call down from her room to ask when I will be done in the kitchen. I have barely seen her for two days, except for a brief check-in yesterday before the rest of us left for a barbecue. She had to go to work. The restaurant where she has been cooking for a year and a half had its third busiest night since opening, and this morning—it’s not even 7:30—my daughter, the sous chef, is dressed and prepping to head out to job number two, egg-cleaning, which is preparation for job number three, making egg sandwiches at the Great Barrington Farmers Market on Saturday mornings. It’s like she woke up from a nap in the Baby Bjorn and went directly into the work world. It really is like that. The middle girl is right behind her.
So this third trip to the dentist with the 12-year-old feels like a holdover task from a sweeter, simpler life, when all day long, all night long, my only real life purpose was to keep alive three fairly easy kids. Truth is, I am sitting here in the cool, foggy early morning feeling pleased and grateful to still reasonably convince myself that I am the only person who can provide this essential dentist transportation service. Especially since I blew it on keeping his teeth alive.
At the barbecue we went to without my oldest child, I talked to a man about my age whose two kids are in and just out of college. They have their own cars, and one was heading off to visit a girlfriend in Indiana, the other about to set up house with a boyfriend in the North End of Boston. The dad is divorced, quit his demanding administrator job two years ago, and no longer has the second job of managing his wife’s musical career. “I come home now,” he said, eyes shining, “and there’s no one else who needs or expects a damn thing from me. It’s pretty great.”
On the ride home, I tried his situation on for size. So, I come home, and no one needs or expects a damn thing from me. I stand alone in the quiet kitchen at the end of the day, put down my bag of groceries for the week. Just one bag. For the whole week. Because it’s just me. How do I feel about that? I think I feel both deliciously free and utterly lost.
The sun has broken through the clouds, so I might fit in a bike ride before the dentist. But no, I don’t think so. My son either still really does prefer for me to be the one to get his breakfast started, or he’s just a sweet kid who knows how much I like and need to be the one to get his breakfast started. He’s on the couch with his phone. I pop my head into the living room to ask the perennial question, “English muffin or cereal?”
“English muffin, please,” he sweetly responds.
How long does it take for perennial questions to die?
Before my son woke up, my husband had joined me on the porch with a cup of coffee, laughing. He said he had just had a complicated summer dream set in West Stockbridge, featuring a big, random cast of characters. Serena Williams and her husband walked by after dropping off their child at the summer camp run by No. 6 Depot, the coffee shop, where our friend Grigori, a 51-year-old architect, was the lead counselor.
“You were there, too,” he said. “You were working at Baldwin’s, holding a clipboard and managing inventory.”
“Was I good at my job?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah, you knew what you were doing.”
Oh good. That’s all I ever needed to know.
