The Waiting Life

A year. And we are close, I’m told, to resuming some of life in some of the ways we’ve known before. The thing is—this quarantine came at the end of a personal era. Things won’t go back to what they were for so very many, and I’m not quite sure how they will go for us. What form, what shape? In the next 18 months, my eldest will graduate college (the college where I teach), my middle and youngest will graduate high school… BANG, BANG… (shooting at the walls of heartache.) Danny has taken a job at the NSF in DC. He is working remotely now, but won’t be forever. We are selling our house next month and moving into an apartment here outside Philly, temporarily. Then… who knows? It’s not the change but the limbo time between this and the next that flummoxes me. Exciting and scary—when I’m optimistic I feel like a teenager, when I’m not it feels like a horror mini-series (that’s not the term they use anymore… is anyone else watching The Servant?) I don’t know where my sons will be in 2022—not one of them. I don’t know where I will be either. I’m supposed to be turning 50. I keep saying I’m nearly 60 which freaks people out. As if aging weren’t what we are all trying to do, however invisibly. Strangely, I will be an empty nester fledging. And it’s true, such mutability has been fairly constant in our lives, much shifting and many alterations and adaptations. I thought a few years ago that we might be settled here. Life thought otherwise… as it is wont to do. There are several other things I am waiting on just at this moment, beyond the vaccine. Does anyone wait happily? Is this a skill one can learn… because with endless practice, I barely tolerate it.