You threw us away
Yours and mine now separate
Ours just midnight tears

Do not pass Go

I met Wei in college.

We actually got together in 1976 when we had just turned 20, but he pursued me for a couple of years before that, and I have a flashbulb memory of him from 1973, when we had Theater 101 together.

This was freshman year, and I was supposed to be a Theater Tech major, but the idiot registrar had assumed that costume design would be in the art department, and had put me down as a painting major. I was taking every theater class that allowed non majors so I could switch, including this survey course of famous plays.

I ended up not switching because I discovered that I really hated theater people. (Isn retrospect I realize what I hated were freshman actors. I remember them as an amorphous mass each attempting to outdo his neighbor in ironic quirkiness.)

Except I remember Wei.

I did not meet him then. I met him sophomore year, after I'd put theater behind me. He walked into Chorus and I thought oh crap the theater people are following me.

And they were, at least that one was. And he kept following me. For almost 38 years.

Until 6 weeks ago.

Two days before Valentine's Day Wei told me was leaving. No discussion, no excuses, no passing Go and collecting $200. We had not been fighting, or sharing unhappiness. He was Just. Done.

Yesterday he moved out.

And that is that. Thirty-eight years gone in six weeks. It's like having your skin peeled off layer by layer, slowly. I don't know if Wei is feeling this as well, because he won't talk to me. A very wise friend has interpreted this as a kind of emotional intelligence-- easier just to cut it off sometimes, to leave the game.

I think it could have been saved. But two people make a marriage. When one of them stops following the other, the game is over.

I wrote the first two verses when I was pregnant with Seng. It describes them perfectly.

....

Seng is an ocean
Deep and shallow still and moving
Inevitable
With shores that stretch beyond sight
And fingers that reach up the strand
And retreat
Back to deep
To the hidden large and constant universe

Nga is a sea of tall grass
With roots tangled anchored
To the ground
And stems that stretch for the golden sun
And wave and reach for
air
They hide the small and private things of the earth
with sound and movement and mystery

Wei is the night sky
Far and sparkling faint lights reaching down
Bright as pain at the source
Soft as mystery to the eye
There is no end
There is no start
Deep beyond imagining and twinkling patterns
Moving across life

Xan is the deep black soil
Holding roots water living things
Nurturer and shroud
Feeding crumbling and flowing
Waiting
Wrapped around rocks, grass’s anchor
Ocean’s edge
As far from the night sky as dreams

The function of adult offspring

They're the only adults in your life that you can yell at when they're stupid.

They're really gone, and that's okay

This month I finally put to rest the notion that my children live here.

I did it by turning their rooms into guest rooms.

In other words, I acknowledged that they don't live here by making it easier for them to visit.

There is now a bed in each of the bedrooms, for the first time since they packed up their stuff, including their furniture, loaded up a van, and moved out. In fact, when my son did this, he helped himself to the extra bed because his friend Matt was sleeping on a floor and had no money to buy a bed. Never got that back, but whatever.

The empty nest is a trope these days. Google it, and you find dozens of crafts-y sites; I guess once the kids are gone there's room for glue guns? Cougar jokes abound, because apparently all the men have moved on to the trophy wives, leaving the mothers the choices of scrapbooking, or cradle robbing. Apparently doing what I did--building my business now that I'm not cleaning up after them any more--isn't part of the meme.

A few of my friends abandoned the nest to the kids, and got adorable apartments in the city; there are guest rooms, but the kids are not encouraged to think of coming "home" since it isn't anymore.

Mind you, I wasn't one of those mothers who dreaded my kids moving out. Indeed, I pretty much counted down the days, and had maybe five minutes of adjustment.

But still I kept the rooms transitional, by which I mean messy and empty, just in case one of them needed to haul all that stuff back in, as kids are wont to do in this economy. But then I found a convertible futon bed that makes an adorable couch, and my sister-in-law gave us a beautiful handmade quilt that works perfectly in one room. My daughter bought a nicer bed for her place, so we hauled her convertible bed which turns into a couch into the other room (I'm sitting on it now as I write this.)

And I cleaned, and fixed the window coverings, and packed away the odds and ends of their childhoods. I hauled everything out of the attic, loaded things like CDs into boxes and warned them to come and get the stuff or it was going to the library, or the dump.

The last step is cleaning out my daughter's closet, which is full mostly of all her skating test and competition dresses. I need the space, and she's moved on, and at last I find a place where I'm a little choked up over the transition.

But it's going to be really nice having my own closet.

The unknown grandchildren

I took my father to lunch today. He hasn't seen his grandchildren since they were little, thanks to his hateful wife. Upon seeing their pictures today, he scribbled this on a napkin:

Heir then

But when were we two

Yet of course a trio

of ken

that by now of course

of a time

Though gone, yet here

where

how

that

be

come

yet

How else

But course of memory

That river’s course

So deep that

Were I there to sleep

I

would then

but awake again

To be of your charm

ii.

About how long

Has that been now

Who

in such a realm counts

such things

Love has but wings

But where from

Ask me that not

Lest one find oneself

So b’gotten

that

in that forget

there is no let in the

b’yond

Oh, is there not a fine Chin,

no

keener

than but yours, dear,

Grand fa

ther

Known to you

As Gran

Pa

That of course

Deep love

Deep love

Keep love

so far down

that were it not

for an a-

boveness

which

Oh! B’lieve

do

oh

lord

for

give

me

now

Yet

But for you

would you, Gran

son?

Here by

Me

Yes as well

for

me

in

That char-

i-

ty

of la

tin

root

Known but in our tongue

as love.

In between

The media call me a baby boomer. Born in 1956, when I was growing up we were considered the trailing end of the post-war babies, born to parents who were vets.

I was an adult when I met someone 8 years younger than me who also considered herself a Baby Boomer. But for me, she missed the two key markers of that generation-- parents who were vets of World War 2, and personal memory of the death of JFK.  Although we hadn't given the generation that followed us a name yet, I would have place her with them--Generation X.

But now I think that she and I really share more with each other than we do with either the Boomers or the Xers.  A little too young for the hippies, a little too old for the Me Generation, those of us now in late middle age have to borrow our identities from the two most unpopular generations in modern times. The Boomers, with their reputation for self-centered entitlement, the Xers with their thoughtless consumerism. We look in both directions and try to distance ourselves from the blame.

After X they telescoped the generations, and gave the ones between the Xers and the Millennials a name- Gen Y, the generation without an identity.

My kids are solidly Millennial-- at once cynic and crusader, trying to delay adulthood because the world they've grown into isn't ready for them. Heading toward 30, they live like college students, in group homes lightly scented with pot and exotic cuisine; tomatoes growing on the roof, powering themselves by pedal because none of them has a job with a secure enough income to afford a car, or the gas to power it, or the faith that the world even cares.

I worry about them. The Boomers blew the promise, and the Xers their home equity, and there we were stuck in the middle, bearing the generation that had to watch the towers fall just as they became aware of the world.