I’ve never liked the word. A crisis sounds like a sports car, or a sudden haircut, or someone leaving.
What I feel is closer to homesickness.
The strange kind, where you’re homesick standing in your own kitchen.
The house is still the house. Same rooms, same windows. But it’s quieter now, and I hear the quiet the way you hear a clock after it stops.
My mother is gone. My father is gone.
With them went the two people who knew me first. There are questions I never thought to ask them, and now I can’t.
That’s homesickness too. Missing a place you can’t go back to, because the place was a person.
My daughter is in college now. For most of her life, she wanted to be wherever I was.
Now I’m the one who wants to be near, and the calls are shorter. It breaks my heart every time.
Maybe that’s the hardest kind of homesickness. The person is still here. I hear her voice whenever she has a minute. But the place she used to be, close enough to need me, is somewhere I can’t go back to.
I won’t pretend I’m fine. I’m not, not yet.
The life I built everything around has changed shape, and I’m still working out where things go. I’m heartbroken. I’m also proud of her. Both are true.
I keep reaching for things that aren’t where I left them.
Nobody warned me about this part. That you can miss a time while you’re still living in the years that came after it.
The cure for homesickness has always been the same. You learn the new place slowly, street by street, until one day it starts to feel like yours.
I’m still learning this one. But I’m learning it.
Have you ever felt homesick without going anywhere? Tell me in the comments. And if this one stayed with you, subscribe below so the next one finds you.
My friend Christine just moved into a new condo, and for her housewarming she invited the people who have known her the longest: family, old friends, and a handful of us who once worked with her in a newsroom.
This condo is Christine’s fresh start. The last few years were hard on her, and she picked herself up and built a good life on her own terms. I’m proud of her. She’s an inspiration to me.
I left that job when my daughter was born, about twenty years ago. A few of the people in that room I still see now and then. Some I hadn’t seen since.
There was no warming up. It was easy right away, the way it is with family, as if we had never been apart.
I think that’s because we grew up together. We were young in that job, and we went through a lot side by side. Now we’re in different places and different stages of life. None of that came into the room.
What surprised me was how close I felt to people I barely knew back then. We had shared a newsroom and not much more. That night we talked like old friends. Maybe the years you spend in the same place count for something, even if you didn’t spend them talking.
At one point we all lined up on Christine’s staircase for a picture, one or two of us per step, leaning on the banister.
Later someone held a phone out for a selfie and nobody stood still. It came out blurry, half of us mid-laugh.
From a pedestal in the corner, a pumpkin with a carved old man’s face watched the whole thing.
I came home grateful. Every person in that room has been through something hard, and every one of them came through it strong. I admire them for that. Being around them reminds me I can be strong too, and that there’s a good life still ahead of me.
I’m glad that after all this time, there’s still a room where we fit.
Who are the people who knew you before? When did you last see them?
Her nose is teal, her skin turns from blue-green to purple at the edges, and her hair is the color of a struck match, so much of it that it falls across half her face and keeps it there. What’s left uncovered are her eyes, lowered and half-closed, as if she’s still deciding whether I can be trusted.
Procreate on iPad
I painted her a few years ago and tagged her #arttherapy without thinking much about it, because that’s simply what she was, something I needed to make before I knew why.
When someone asked me recently who she was supposed to be, I reached for words and kept coming back with ones that almost fit: future, alien, angel, ethereal, confused. Each of them touched some part of her, and none of them could hold all of her at once.
We’re taught that naming a feeling is how we come to understand it, and most of the time that’s true. But some feelings arrive in colors that were never meant to sit together, the way a teal nose was never meant to sit on a face, and the moment you give them a name, they shrink to fit it.
She’s one of those. On some days she looks hopeful to me, and on others she looks lost, and somewhere along the way I stopped needing to decide which.
Lately, I understand her better than I used to.
I still don’t know her name, and I’ve stopped looking for one. She doesn’t seem to want to be explained. She seems to want what all of us want, to be looked at long enough to be seen.
Is there something in your life you’ve stopped trying to name? Tell me in the comments. And if this one stayed with you, subscribe below so the next one finds you.
When she lived with me, I knew her life. The shape of her days, the small things, what was on her mind.
I still want that. I want to be the person she tells. Maybe because she’s my only child. Maybe because somewhere along the way, she became my whole life.
I know this longing from the other side, too. I wish I’d spent more time with my mother. Really enjoyed her. Breathed her in. As a child, you think your parents will be here forever. You know people die, but that feels so far away. You don’t realize how fast it happens. The same way you don’t realize how fast your child grows up.
That’s the beauty of life, and the saddest part of it.
If you’re a mother who knows this longing, you’re not the only one.
Little Birds
Something in me has gone quiet,
further down than sleep.
I stand at the window of my own life
and can't find the latch
to let myself back in.
The house is the same size.
It only feels bigger.
Her door stays open
because closing it would mean something.
Little birds learn to fly.
That was always the plan.
I showed her the sky myself,
pointed at it for years,
said go.
And she went,
far, the way they do.
I still want the small things,
the calls about nothing,
her days told back to me.
I didn't know what my elders were to me
until I'd lived long enough
to count who was left.
She'll learn it the same way.
I only have to still be here.
Nobody tells the mother bird
what to do with the nest after.
So I do what mothers do.
I keep the branch warm.
I listen for wings.
My daughter was home for her father’s birthday, and we just dropped her back at school. After she left, I cleaned her room. Then I closed the door.
I keep it closed. It’s too painful to see her room without her in it.
She’s a junior in college now, and by the third year I was supposed to have figured this out. That was the unspoken deal. You cry through the first semester, and by junior year you’ve found your purpose. A business, a degree, a cause. Something of your own.
People assume I’ll go back to broadcast journalism, the career I left to raise her. I won’t. Every part of me says that chapter is behind me, and I want something completely different. I don’t know yet what it is or how to find it. But every day I push myself to feel secure where I am, and most days I remember how blessed I am.
I’m still waiting. The door is still closed.
I know she’s doing great. She’s fine. I miss her anyway, with an ache I can’t explain to anyone who hasn’t been here. I miss her face, her real face across the kitchen in the morning, not on a screen.
Some nights I open Life360 just to see the little dot that shows where she is. On an ordinary day, that’s the closest I get to her. It tells me where she is. It can’t tell me how she is.
I admire women who are full-time mothers, and women who manage full-time careers and motherhood at once. I couldn’t do both. So I chose the one that mattered most, and that was my daughter. She still is. She always will be.
Now she’s grown, and the job I chose is done. I’m truly grateful to watch her out in the world, finding her footing. And still, without her, I feel lost.
Some women reach this point and simply move forward. They’re in a good place, building the next part of their lives, and I’m glad for them. That isn’t me. Not yet.
On the hardest days, it feels like a whiteout. The light is so bright I can’t see the horizon or tell which way is forward. That’s the closest I can come to explaining lost.
Missing your child is hard enough. Then a second voice shows up to tell you you’re doing it wrong. Too much, for too long. Why can’t you let go? Why aren’t you doing more? I’d never talk to a friend that way. Most days, I talk to myself that way.
So I’m practicing something else. We don’t all cope the same way, and we aren’t meant to. One woman’s solution is another woman’s dead end.
Part of the difference is where I come from. In my Afghan family, closeness was the furniture of daily life. We lived near each other, ate together, and knew each other’s days without asking. Girls didn’t leave home until they married. It was old-fashioned, but it was how I grew up. Raising a daughter who would pack up and go away to college meant doing something the women before me never did. So when she did exactly what I raised her to do, I had no map for this goodbye.
I’ll say the harder thing too. Some days the sadness runs deep, and my health doesn’t always give me the energy I want. The missing makes the sadness heavier, and the sadness makes the missing louder. Still, I fight my way through.
I don’t fight alone. I have women in my life who make me feel I’m enough exactly as I am. They hold my hand when things are hard and applaud when things are good. Growing older has taught me how much that matters: friends who walk with you through each chapter and don’t need you to have it all figured out. That sisterhood is a big part of how I’m finding my way back to myself.
And I come from strong women. My father was a diplomat at the United Nations, and my parents came here planning to go home when his posting ended. Then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and there was no home to go back to. My mother raised us in a country that was never the plan and made sure every one of us went to college. Both my grandmothers, my aunts, and my cousins lost the lives they knew and started over in foreign lands. If they could carry that, I can carry this.
My daughter is watching, too. Children do as you do, not as you say. If she sees me admit how hard this is and keep going anyway, that’s what she’ll remember.
If you feel it too, the loss and the pain and the pride all at once, you’re not the only one. That’s why I’m writing this. There are many of us standing in the same storm, and you’re not standing in it alone.
