During the first few days after the girls had moved out, I felt as if I were recovering from a car accident. I was in a sort of shock, where I knew what had happened was absolutely horrible and sad, but there was also an insane humor about it. Like, can you believe that we actually made it through to the other side of this? Do you remember how crazy that was?!
After that, the house began to feel hauntingly empty. We have a large 3 bedroom house. 2 of the bedrooms and one of the common rooms were being used for the girls in the end. Jeff went into the rooms about once per week to water the plants, but other than that we didn’t really go in. We had emptied most of the contents out to either send with the girls or put out of the way so that the girls would not miss it when they moved out. All that remained was some large furniture.
I felt as hollow as the house. Every day, I was barely finding ways to pass my time and I often thought “Wow, this would have been a really busy day if…” or “Oh, it would have been therapy day”. Although I missed T-4, I did not often cry. The times that I did was when we visited their schools, which I can’t completely understand or explain. My work had dropped from nearly 10 sessions per week down to 2 or 3. J- finished his semester and we spent a week going for walks and watching movies. Then we went on vacation, as I described here.
After that, I began to just forget the empty rooms and began adding things back to my life that I had missed before. Within a few weeks, my life looked eerily like it had before the girls moved in. I focused on rebuilding my massage practice, I started playing old-time music weekly, I started writing again, and I began pilates. J- and I went for walks and visited restaurants that we had missed. We ate Thai food! I find it amazing how much has fallen back into place. The hardest six months of my life just passed and things around me have not changed that much.
That is the short story. The long story would involve telling you about my back going out (in a really, really painful way!) and that being the wake-up call that I couldn’t mope for any longer. Don’t get me wrong, we are still healing. We are constantly reflecting on what happened and how things will be different. Although we have had ideas and thoughts about our future, not a single day goes by that we don’t appreciate the freedom and independence that we have now.
