Separation Anxiety

August 26, 2020

It is time to leave. To go back Downeast and stay through September. My suitcase is in the car. I’ve cleaned the kitchen, ordered the piles of paper on the bookshelf, watered the ten foot rubber tree in the living room.

“I am all ready to go,” I say to Bob.   But really, I’m not ready at all.  I don’t want to leave.  I feel small and uncertain.  I sit in the rocker on the porch, listen to the chickadees and the goldfinches chatter in the trees.  Curious about this unease, this tight twist of tinfoil rolling inside my chest, I wait in the warm sun which has just reached the porch, for images to rise, information to arrive from wherever in the brain’s clues to the unconscious wait, poised for the whistle which calls them up into the light. 

I stare at the tall hydrangea with the exuberant pink and white blooms, still in its large greenhouse pot. Tomorrow, Bob will dig a hole and plant it before he comes up.  He has had to buy soil because the soil around the house is very thin.  The magnolia Bridget gave me for Mother’s Day the year we moved in has not fared well in that soil.  It looks thin and malnourished beside the new hydrangea. 

Mother’s Day.  My mind wanders.  A little girl, huddled close beside her mother, holding fast to her skirt emerges, like a shadow. The little girl doesn’t want to ever let go of that skirt.  As long as she holds onto the soft cotton, she is safe.  The world will always smell of the lavender scent of her mother’s dress.  The world will always be comprehensible through her mother. Nothing will change.  But if she lets go, walks out into the world smelling of strange odors and foreign in shape something dangerous could happen to her. 

Yesterday was Bob’s eighty second birthday. On these special days when we are together as family, I feel sort of dreamy, loose. There are little surprises everywhere. Everything that happens feels new and otherworldly, like I’ve entered a magical realm or a fairy tale.  My own family of origin story gives me no imagination or vision for a future with a family that comes together like this. 

Colin came with potato salad and Bridget and Chris grilled juicy bbq ribs, made moist by wrapping them in a blanket and putting them in a cooler for a few hours after they were cooked.  Addie painted miniature pictures on little canvases, one titled Midnight Rain which remind me of the little pictures my grandfather made and Finn made him a heart from Legos and inside the heart was a little door and inside that a little pebble, because, he said, “Gigi Bob is such a gem.” Around a fire outside in the firepit, Bridget told the story of visiting Bob’s parents in Illinois by herself when she was ten. 

“How did you get there?” I asked her, astounded that I would have let her go by herself. 

“I flew!” She said.

“No!  I let you fly all by yourself? I’d forgotten.  Oh, I am so sorry.  You must have been so scared.” 

“No,” she said, “not at all.  It was so easy, and the stewardesses were so nice to me and I got off the plane and there were Gram and Gramps. It was great.”    

Here I am, seventy five, feeling too little to leave my home in Freeport and drive three hours north to another home, a place that holds the beauty of the sea, a warm group of friends, and, in this season, flocks of migrating warblers.  There she was, ten, flying, alone. 

Separation Anxiety.  I give it a name.  I must be having separation anxiety. I don’t want to leave this circle of family.  If feels safe here in the woods beside my daughter and her family.  But, like the topsy-turvy world beyond the woods, it’s topsy turvy for me to feel, for the first time, what children at five experience.  In 1950, when I was that age, I was pigtailed and wide eyed and eager for the world beyond my mother’s skirts.  I hadn’t yet imagined that world could scare me. 

Naming it as I sit here on the porch helps.  “You aren’t going forever,” I say to myself.  “You can come back anytime.”  That helps too. Though I am not sure that what I will come back to will resemble what I have now.  The uncertainty about the kids going back to school in two weeks, about whether it will be safe to see them, hug them, hold them, chirps in the background like the late summer crickets.  The dread I feel about the rise of authoritarianism in this country and the chaos the President could lose on us in the next few months before the election doesn’t chirp.  It drums, low, ominous, unremitting.

But for the moment, I feel better, find the keys, kiss Bob, who will drive up in a few days, goodbye, drive Downeast.