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She Is Ready

She is ready to move out and be on her own, but she is not ready. Kris and I are ready to be empty nesters, but we’re not ready. Ready or not, here comes the sun.

Birthing gives way to nursing, which gives way to cuddling, which gives way to reading aloud, which gives way to teaching, which gives way to discipline, which gives way to growth, which gives way to breaking away, which gives way to echoes. Parents live for the echoes.

There really isn’t a definitive frozen moment of “moving out,” like a singular wave of the hand and a car pulling away. It’s more a rosary of moments, strung together one memory at a time, one artifact at a time. Do you have enough sheets? Do you have a dish drainer? What furniture do you need? What else do you need?

Parents always ask that last one, “What else do you need?” We never get the answer we want.

Her room is emptier than any room I have ever seen. We will fill it, of course. Kris needs more office space. We have stored some of my late Mother’s paintings in the closet. I’ll move a desk in, along with a file cabinet, and it will be a working room, an efficient office. We won’t say it very often, but it will always be “Meggie’s room,” even though the posters are gone. When she lived there, the room was brimming with life and energy. It was always messy, always interesting, and always a bit mysterious.

Our only child has moved out. She is a freshman at the University of Arizona, majoring in theater studies. She loves all things theatrical. She has acted, written, and directed. She was one of a handful of Catalina Foothills High School students chosen to produce and direct a play. She chose Tennessee Williams’ “Summer and Smoke,” a difficult work that offends current standards of political correctness. The lead actor smoked a cigarette. A Hispanic character was portrayed in a very unflattering, even bigoted, manner, because that’s how the part was written. Meg didn’t flinch, and I don’t care. She took a risk and pulled it off. The show was great. The kid knows her stuff. She will find her way to Broadway.

Broadway is a long way from here.

It’s also a long way from the pre-dawn hours in the Tucson Medical Center maternity ward, where Meggie’s grandfather, Joe Tully, held her for the first time and fell deeply in love. He didn’t want a grandchild, at least that’s what he said, until he held her and rocked her gently in the rocking chair provided by the good people at TMC. Nobody else was born in TMC in the early morning of November 16, 1984. Dad and Meggie gently rocked together in the quiet, empty maternity ward as the sun slowly crept over the horizon on the first day of Meggie’s life. Years later, Dad admitted that his “best friend is a three year old girl.” The feeling was mutual.

One of my mental snapshots is of Meggie, sitting in her Grandfather’s room in 1998, alone with her thoughts and grief. My Dad had suffered a stroke and, after learning to walk all over again, fell in his own bedroom and broke his neck. He lasted ten days after that. On the tenth day, he told me he wanted to die. I told him that I understood and assured him that all of us would be okay. He died that night. I think Meggie was okay, but I still return to the snapshot.

Meg’s paternal Grandmother did not see her graduate this year. Three days before the graduation ceremony, Margaret I. Tully had major surgery for an abdominal problem. She had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, but still recognized her family, and looked forward to seeing Meggie graduate. The medical procedure was too much for her and she died after ten days – just like Dad.

Life seems like falling dominoes sometimes, one piece displaced by a predecessor, displacing another piece, and then another, until a random pattern of the fallen is displayed. That’s what we leave behind in our wake, one fallen domino after another, and a crazy pattern that the dominoes craft for us, despite our personal designs. All of our legacies are random patterns, partly crafted by our ingenuity, most of it based on fate and circumstance. The only thing that changes the pattern the dominoes create is love. There is no other force that can affect it.

Kris and I want to affect the pattern of Meg’s dominoes and leave an imprint on her life. We want her to cherish the values that we cherish, among which are independence, self-reliance, and a sense of community. We hope that she will bring art and creativity into a world that desperately needs art and creativity. We hope that she will learn to teach, because that’s one of the most important things in life. Beyond that, we hope that she will be able to inspire, because that is the most important thing in life.

And, in her wake, we hope to inspire ourselves. I suppose that’s the challenge of all newly minted empty nesters, the need to fill the vacuum left by the departed child. For more than nineteen years, counting the in vitro months, our lives have been centered on Meg. Now, they can return to being centered on us, as it was before Meg came along. But, they won’t. Meg will continue to share center stage. That reality won’t go away, even though she has.

(c) September 11, 2003 by Mike Tully

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