Shortly after my then-husband and I uprooted our family and moved from Colorado to Brooklyn, our 8-year-old was cast in the New York City Ballet production of The Nutcracker. This meant that in addition to escorting her to Lincoln Center for class and rehearsal six days a week—her 4-year-old sister in tow—I was on stage mom duty for every show, painting a full face of makeup on her the way the salesgirl at Sephora showed me and curling her long hair into ringlets for the party scene.
That same winter, my husband was featured in an ad campaign for the college where he was an adjunct instructor. The posters were everywhere. Serene-faced, he looked on as I raced to catch a train, then loomed over me when I settled into a seat—if I was lucky enough to get one. “I teach & I do,” the copy read, superimposed over a photograph of his hand holding a pen, doodling cartoons along the top of the train car.
I was a proud wife and mama, hustling my little ballet star uptown and telling friends which train lines were most likely to have my husband’s ad (all of them, it seemed), until one day a pointed remark from a fellow parent at the girls’ school stopped me in my tracks.
“Your family has made a real splash since you moved to the city,” she said as we milled around after a PTA meeting. “When’s it going to be your turn?”
I’ve re-lived that scene many times in the intervening 14 years. Sometimes I think she was just being mean, taking a jab at me out of jealousy. Sometimes I think I took her comment too much to heart, that she didn’t mean anything by it. But mostly, I wonder the same thing: When is it going to be my turn?
In August, my little one—the one who was perpetually perched on my hip for all those frantic ballet class/rehearsal/show runs—followed her sister off to college, making me an empty-nester at age 47. I’m the first one among my friends, most of whom are older than me, with children younger than mine. My husband and I separated not long after that subway ad campaign, and although I’ve done my share of swiping on the apps and weathered a couple of disastrous long-term relationships since the divorce, I’m decidedly single and can’t see that changing. Since being laid off in June, I don’t even have a job to anchor me. Except for three cats (yes, three—a story for another day), I’m truly on my own.
If I was waiting for my moment, it’s here. It’s finally my turn. No more excuses.
I don’t go home after moving my older daughter into her dorm over Labor Day weekend. Instead, I drive to the coast of Maine, where a friend from church has invited me to spend the week with him (platonically—he is gay and I am done with romance in any case). He has also just dropped a child at college—we’d been counting down the days all summer—and together we float through sun-kissed days that feel like they exist outside of time, marveling at our newfound freedom and reassuring each other that our futures are indeed rich with possibility.
“It’s going to be great,” we take turns saying. “It’s going to be really great.”
Though we’ve rarely socialized outside of church, we quickly fall into an easy intimacy, me shuffling around in my nightgown and bite guard in the early mornings, bangs curling in a crazy halo around my head, him showing me his favorite spots (shoutout to Market Basket) and welcoming me into his circle of friends. We throw a dinner party and realize we make unbeatable euchre partners. We go sailing in the afternoons and make bonfires in the evenings, taking turns queuing up songs and poking at the fire until the flames jump high.
At the edge of the ocean, there’s a place to start over again, the little bluetooth speaker booms. “That’s us,” he says. “At the edge of the ocean.”
One morning just after sunrise he points out dozens of seals gathered just offshore, faces turned toward the sun. I dash inside to trade my nightgown for a bikini and as I wade into the frigid water, the seals all turn their bowling-ball heads toward me. I can see their whiskers twitching, their big black eyes appraising me.
“Hello,” I whisper. “Don’t be scared. I just want to swim with you.” Their heads disappear under the water, but when I turn my back they come closer, like a silent game of Marco Polo. One of them eyes me, then dives under, resurfaces, stares me down. I dive under and kick my feet in the air, doing my best seal impression. We play like that, me and 25 seals (I counted), until I’m covered in goosebumps and shaking with cold.
Our last morning in Maine dawns gray and cloudy—too cloudy to see the sunrise I’ve woken up to watch every day we’ve been on the beach. We silently strip beds and scrub dishes, sweep floors and pack still-damp swimsuits into plastic bags. Retrieving my soap and shampoo from the outdoor shower, I realize I haven’t showered inside for over a week and wonder how I can possibly return to my real life.
It rains the whole drive home.
Back in Brooklyn, I avoid going into the girls’ room. When I do, I find a sock I’d been searching for all summer. “Have either of you seen the match to this?” I remember asking, dangling a lone running sock in their doorway, hoping my inquiry won’t elicit a stinging reply or a slammed door. Now I have my other sock, and no one to close the door in my face or roll her eyes at me.
I poke around a little more and quickly turn up three of my favorite pens, several coffee-stained spoons, and a package of rolling papers. This last I tuck into my pocket, glad to find them since one of my empty nest ambitions is to get good at rolling my own joints. (Pre-rolls are not in my laid-off writer co-founding a start-up budget.)
Exhausted and sniffly, I convince myself I have COVID and spend an evening under a blanket on the couch, cats at my feet and in my lap, swabbing my nostrils and watching George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg bravely face death after a 100-foot wave sinks their swordfish boat. I haven’t seen A Perfect Storm since it was in theaters 23 years ago, but that scene has haunted me ever since. In Maine, I took a kayak out alone and paddled away from shore until my heart was thudding and the butterflies in my stomach urged me to turn back. What if I’d kept going? When I die, I think, I want to be pushed out to sea on a burning pyre like a Viking.
Two tests (more treasures unearthed from the girls’ room) tell me I do not have COVID, but the fog surrounding me doesn’t lift. I don’t shower for three days and the third morning, I can smell myself. “You smell like a period,” one of the kids said to me recently, wrinkling her nose when I swooped in to kiss her good morning. Indignant, I demanded to know what she meant—but I knew. I’d smelled that earthy, rotten smell at my grandmother’s house, smelled it when my own mother hugged me as I flinched away, and now I smell it coming from somewhere deep inside me, where my reproductive organs seem to be having an extended going-out-of-business sale, shelves cleared out but the lights still on.
The community of friends I’ve worked so hard to cultivate, the village who helped me raise my girls, is missing in action, undoubtedly busy with jobs and partners and children still at home. I hear nothing from the man with whom I’ve been in what kids these days call a “situationship” for the better part of a year.
(I think of our first date, when I went to pull cash out of my wallet and found a folded-over post-it note where a $20 bill had been the day before. “Mom, I’m sorry but I need money for the Halloween dance and you are dead asleep,” read my daughter’s carefully penciled handwriting. I showed it to him and he threw his head back laughing; that’s when I knew I liked him. He never let me pay anyway. Now if I put $20 in my wallet, it’s always there the next morning.)
I don’t reach out to any of them either. It’s for the best, I think. I need to focus on work. Lord knows I have enough to do, between Swedish Death Cleaning my apartment, launching a website, and figuring out how to pay New York City rent and two college tuitions.
Instead of doing any of that, I enroll in an online poetry class and stay up until the wee hours eating cinnamon toast and watching Liz Gilbert talk about the elusive creative genius. I get very, very high and write in my journal like an angsty teenager. I take myself to matinees on Tuesdays when movies at the Alamo Drafthouse are only $9. I go to therapy, I feed the cats, I force myself to go on walks. It feels like all I can do.
I think of my seal friends back in Maine, pointing their faces toward the sun. The sun that rises every morning no matter how wretched we are, the “best preacher that ever was / dear star, that just happens / to be where you are in the universe / to keep us from ever-darkness / to ease us with warm touching / to hold us in the great hands of light” as Mary Oliver wrote.
I call a friend back home in Colorado. We’ve known each other for almost two decades and have seen each other through multiple moves, divorces, breakups, deaths, and more. I sob into the phone for a long time—I’m all alone, I don’t have any money, how did my life end up like this, I tried so hard, I am trying SO HARD—and after we hang up, she texts me.
“I have a few days off work next week and I think I should come and be with you. How does that sound?” She says if money would be more helpful, she’ll Zelle me whatever she’d spend on a plane ticket instead. “It’s up to you.”
Please come, I say.
Just knowing she’s on the way starts to lift me out of my funk. I put fresh sheets on one of the girls’ beds, and on mine too in case she wants to curl up and sleep with me. By the time she shows up in the lobby of my building, beaming and clutching a little bag of vomit (“I got carsick in the Lyft and didn’t know what to do with it!”) I’m ready to believe once more that this next chapter of my life is, indeed, going to be great. Really great.
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Elizabeth Laura Nelson has been airing her dirty laundry online since she wrote an “It Happened To Me” story for the late, great xoJane. Since then she’s worked at websites including YourTango, Elite Daily, Woman’s World, and Best Life. When she was 12, she kissed the George Michael poster above her bed every night before she went to sleep.
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