I often tell new mothers about the “many weanings” a woman goes through and that weaning a child from breastfeeding is just one of many. Now I’m going through another weaning myself: as of this week, all my children will be living on their own.<\/p>\n
My oldest son lives back east with two roommates in a rental house. My youngest son is moving into a rental house with three friends. My middle son is moving to a house his girlfriend bought. They’ll be fixing up, painting, installing, redecorating, and clearing the land for many months. I may bring over a KFC bucket and a bottle of wine once in a while, and they may even deign to come over to my house for an actual home-cooked Sunday dinner, but things will never be quite the same. The intense living-together time, where people get up in the morning and sit at a kitchen table together, the time when people sleepily wish each other good night and then good morning again: that time has passed for me. <\/p>\n
Young men moving out from parents’ homes, moving on, and becoming self-reliant are all part of the natural order of things. But this week was also my last to feel day-to-day needed. I’m supposed to be celebrating this empty nest, relishing the freedom to use rooms in new ways as I please, gorging on all this time to myself. But being useful, involved, and part of an active live-in family was a dream job. This sudden quiet strangles my soul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I often tell new mothers about the “many weanings” a woman goes through and that weaning a child from breastfeeding is just one of many. Now I’m going through another weaning myself: as of this week, all my children will be living on their own. My oldest son lives back east with two roommates in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":560,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346\/revisions\/560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}