I feel it like it’s happening today. Standing in that driveway hugging my son when his friends are calling for him from the car. He keeps assuring me. He’ll be back in a few days and this is no big deal. But it is a big deal. A real big deal.
I can feel the burning behind my eyes when I picture this image. It was the very last day I ever lived in the same home with my son. Shortly after this, he moved in with his father and I moved in with my sister. Divorce is hard and creates situations that you never planned on. He was only 14, about to start high school, and I was no longer going to be the one that he came home to, had dinners with, or who I got to say good night to as I passed his room in the hallway.
But it is a big deal. A real big deal. I can feel the burning behind my eyes when I picture this image. It was the very last day I ever lived in the same home with my son.
This may seem like a minor thing, but it was a major thing for me. I kept asking myself, “how did I get here?“ That’s a rhetorical question now of course, but then I think it was hard for me to see that my shadow side had contributed to the series of events that resulted in my son spending his high school years at his father‘s home and not mine. It wasn’t like he wasn’t seeing me or talking to me, I just wasn’t the parent relegated to cook the dinners and fold the laundry.
As I look back on it now, I know that this was the path I needed to take. It was not the path that I had set out for myself, but it was the path that I was meant to take. I needed to finally face the ways in which I participated in my own suffering. I needed to see my own actions and how they contributed to the dissolution of that life I thought I had chosen for myself. And I needed to really take a good look at whether the goals that I had for myself were goals that I created or goals that were created for me.
I needed to finally face the ways in which I participated in my own suffering. I needed to see my own actions and how they contributed to the dissolution of that life I thought I had chosen for myself.
What did I want anyway? I had no idea. But in the beginning it was just grieving. A lot of grieving. Grieving over a life I had thought I had wanted and thought I had created for myself. Grieving over the life I was not going to get to have with my kid in the same house with me. Grieving over the feeling that I was abandoned once again and could not seem to figure out what love is. Grieving because I was going to need to parent my younger child on my own, which I had not planned. Grieving because I was older now, and I felt like I had wasted huge parts of my adult life.
That driveway. It’s a symbol. It’s a place where a new path began. And in the beginning, I hated that path. I was resentful that I was on it. However, overtime, I have grown to understand the new path was the best path for me. And the best path for my children. And that path has opened up a whole new world for me. A world of self-love. I had to make the decision that I wanted to design a life that I wanted to be in, and design it I have. I’m not done yet, but I am far more committed to myself than I ever have been. The days of grieving have helped me to appreciate what was truly lost in that driveway. I wasn’t losing my son, I was recognizing I had already lost myself. And this path I never would’ve chosen for myself, led me to me. What’s your driveway moment?
What’s your driveway moment?