#192: Twelve minute mornings.

Grudging lessons from the empty nest.

I don’t think this is the morning routine all those influencers are raving about, but I love it:

Weekdays, I’m up early. I empty the dishwasher, the dehumidifier, and my brain into the pages of my notebook. Then, I take my tea and toast at the kitchen island, twiddling my thumbs while I wait for Kendall’s footsteps on the stairs. The patter of her sensible flats, the swish of her pleated pants, and her overstuffed work bag rhythmically bumping against the staircase railing announce her arrival.

She fries her eggs, toasts her toast, and packs her lunch while we chitchat about her projects for the day and her plans after work: a happy hour or a Nats game. Maybe dinner with a friend. Then she doles out my admin responsibilities:

“This needs to go to the post office, this to UPS for an Amazon return.”

“Got it!” I reply, like some pick-me girl happy to help the queen bee. The truth is I am so happy to be her trusty sidekick, running errands during the day while she kicks ass at her internship.

Twelve minutes later, my working girl is out the door, driving her Mazda to the commuter lot, then catching the Metro to her M Street Office. I clear our plates, wipe the counter, sit back down to make my to-do list for the day, and think to myself wow, I could get used to this!

(Nostalgia sidebar here: Kendall’s future as a corporate wonk was undeniable, starting at no more than three years old. She’d hold my earphones up to her ears and spout gibberish. “What are you doing?” I’d ask. She’d lift her tiny index finger to her lips, “Shhh! I’m on a call!”. I’d give her discarded printouts of PowerPoints to draw on; she’d come back with graphs and numbers and boxes in the Crayola rainbow, make-believe decks of her own. At Christmas craft time she wouldn’t stop at the gingerbread house, she’d also make sure to add a sugar-cube table with gummy bear coworkers seated around it. “What are the gummy bears doing?” I’d ask. “They are having a meeting!” she’d exclaim.)

Me and Kendall when she was three!

As my sell-ice-to-Eskimos daughter is wrapping up her executive recruiting internship, these twelve-minute-mornings have lulled me into thinking that whatever came next, it would be here. Nearby. On M Street. Forever.

So when she announced one Tuesday evening over tacos that she was thinking about moving to New York City post graduation, my heart dropped into my New Balance sneakers. My very practiced game face quickly slid into place. Words like absolutely, sounds great, you do you! spewed forth. But inside, a neon sign was flashing: AGAIN?!?

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Who knows if this move will come to pass. Which in no way prevents me from pre-catastrophizing, pre-grieving, pre-questioning the meaning of life. I’ve realized that even though I thought I had the empty nest processed, integrated, and assimilated since Kendall left for college in 2023, well, clearly, not so much.

So I’ve been doing what I do best: sinking into grief like a cat into a bathtub, while simultaneously watching myself from the outside, amused.

First, my brain jumped to berating myself for even being surprised: seriously, that working girl would not have lived with her mom in her corporate phase for more than five minutes. There was never going to be a ‘twelve minute mornings’ dream sequence with loving gazes over breakfast indefinitely. Ok, but at least I’d know she was sleeping in a DuPont Circle duplex or an Adams Morgan row house or an Arlington condo — thirty minutes away in a pinch. And that distance, or lack thereof, felt comforting.

Next my brain went to the destination for this highway robbery, attempting to assign blame: New York, it’s all your fault. We’ve had an ambivalent relationship, but I thought we were getting to know each other better? Now you are stealing my kid? But on the practical side, the train ride is so easy, tons of her friends are moving there too, and it’s not even a timezone away. Kendall even proclaimed, “I’m going to teach you to love New York.” (I may resist.)

While I try every time, logicking my way out of loss never gets me where I need to go. So, I had to dig a little deeper to see what my seething was really about.

A walk through Great Falls did the trick, getting me out of my head and into my emotions — I was mad for thinking I’d mastered the empty nest. Mad that I did not see this coming. Mad that I cannot whack-a-mole this particular bugaboo into submission and off my “loss list”.

Only now, as I’m writing this, can I finally even see the deepest layer — it’s the gradual changing of my relationship with the kids. As their lives fill, they just don’t need me as much. Which is the entire objective of being a parent. We are working towards our own obsolescence. And the metric of that is watching our kids gain — independence, adventure, expanded ecosystems, cities they love — as we lose.

Kendall and I while she was still in highschool.

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For a while I’m going to sit and seethe. I’ll talk to myself, to Kavon, to Richie, to you, dear reader. And eventually, what always happens will happen — the frustration will dissipate. After enough rides of this merry-go-round, I’m starting to see my process more clearly:

First, shock: My knee-jerk reaction is to get pissed off, to yell WTF in the face of loss. I ask to speak to management. I wave over the referee. I file a complaint. I wallow.

Second, anger: I exercise my metaphorical biceps with some fist waving at the heavens.

Third, intellectualism: Lab coat and pocket protector at the ready, I try to think my way out of any and all feelings — “it’s not so bad / I can fix it / you’re being dramatic.”

Fourth, emotions: I dig deeper, into the uncomfortable and icky feelings, like flipping over a rock on a muddy trail and seeing all the squirming life underneath.

Fifth, trial-and-error: Day by day, I learn to deal. What can help me feel better, in the short term first, then the long?

I’m not quite ready to own it — because I’m still licking my wounds over the potential loss of Kendall moving out next summer — but seeing my grief process so clearly is, dare I say it, actually empowering. I have been here so many times, I not only know the terrain, I know I’ll make it across the jagged peaks and deep valleys.

I think, collectively, we don’t want to look back at our losses. Not in anger, nor in sadness, nor even in contemplation. We want them to be one, done, and erased from our memory. However, loss is NEVER one and done. And refusing to look back and take stock of how we got through each loss just robs us of becoming familiar with our process… which is the only way we can learn to trust it.

Clarification/warning: this doesn’t mean loss somehow gets comfortable. Sorrow still abounds, along with insecurity, fear, avoidance — just like on the TV show Cheers, all the regulars will be there. We don’t come to some enlightened bliss state where loss doesn’t bother us. At least I haven’t, and I think anyone saying that’s possible is full of BS.

But we can learn to feel some agency with loss. We can go through it with our eyes open, so we recognize we’ve been here before and made it through. We can dull our knee-jerk reaction of avoiding and delaying loss at all costs. We can take a deep, shaky breath and face it, so all the good things that await on the other side — Kendall steamrolling NYC, seeing Broadway plays together, a whole bunch of things I simply can’t imagine yet because I’m too busy holding a grudge against that rotten Big Apple up north — can come to pass.

Kendall and I in Mexico for spring break last year.

Enjoying every twelve-minute morning I have left,

P.S. If you’re tired of loss being a terrible, dark, no-man’s land, and want to feel a little bit more agency when you’re going through it, check out my book: Do Loss: A New Way to Move Through Change.