Zibby Mag

By Candi Sary

My son and daughter were both about to leave for college, and I was having a hard time imagining two empty chairs at the dinner table every night and two empty beds in the upstairs bedrooms. My daughter was heading to a four-year university, and my son was transferring from our local junior college. I didn’t know how I’d manage not seeing their faces every day, not kissing them goodbye each morning before school, not hearing them laugh or share stories of their days.

True, I’d also no longer hear them argue or complain or make fun of me for my “mom-isms.” There’d be no more sandy wetsuits slung over the tub or volleyball shoes left in the middle of the floor for me to trip on. But in those final months, I even relished the annoying, chaotic, messy parts of motherhood. I’d rather have had all of it than none of it.

The anticipation of my kids leaving home kept me up at night. It often brought me to tears, but never in front of them. I wanted them to feel good about their big adventures, so I shared my anxieties and sadness with my husband. It was more than just missing their presence. I would miss who I was with them. I’d been a mother for 19 years. I felt like I was losing a part of myself.

As newlyweds, my husband and I had a dog, a cat, a rabbit, and even a chicken in our small apartment. I teased him that if we didn’t have a baby soon, I might bring home a horse.

“Remember how much we wanted to start a family?” I would ask my husband over and over in those final months. “It’s over now. That thing we dreamed about—we did it and now it’s done. What do we do now?”

My husband tried to comfort me with his more optimistic outlook. He saw it as an accomplishment. We’d done well raising our kids and he felt good about sending them into the world to find their dreams. “We’ll find plenty to do,” he assured me. And he was right.

Once the kids moved away, time began to feel like a luxury. My husband and I surfed, paddle-boarded, took our three dogs to the beach at sunset, cooked unrushed dinners together and really enjoyed the reduced stress. Without all the pressures and demands of parenthood, we rekindled who we’d been back before we had them. After all the anxiety and anticipation, I unexpectedly enjoyed that year. It was also the year my first novel, Black Crow White Lie, was published and so I had a book to nurture, and much more time to write.

Of course, even with all the good that came, I still missed the kids. It was getting easier. The distractions in my new life helped a lot, but sometimes I’d look at their pictures on the wall or step into their quiet bedrooms and the absence would make me catch my breath. The hardest part of this adjustment phase was when they came back home for visits. The goodbyes felt like fresh losses, and the emptiness in the house would linger a while. I was getting used to this new phase of life far better than I’d expected, yet deep down I continued to mourn the end of motherhood. Without realizing it, it came through in my writing.

When I was working on my novel Magdalena, I thought I was writing a ghost story. The supernatural elements I’d come up with excited my imagination, but my main character, Dottie, kept pulling me in another direction. Her four miscarriages haunted her more than the ghosts I’d given her. Having no children of her own, she secretly and obsessively began to pretend that 15-year-old Magdalena next door was her daughter. And this strange pseudo mother-daughter relationship soon took over the novel.

Magdalena looked like my daughter, Cinnamon. She even acted like her. And yet I didn’t recognize right away how personal this story was. Outwardly the novel is not about kids going off to college, and really nothing about Dottie’s life resembles mine. Yet once I’d completed it, I recognized my grief between the lines, and I understood the story helped me mourn the empty nest.

Had I been writing the novel while raising my kids, it might have reflected motherhood’s joys and chaos, its playfulness and challenges. If I’d written it long enough after they’d grown, when the rough edges of the experience had smoothed into sweet memories, it might have had a more nostalgic feel, along with the wisdom that a mom is always a mom no matter how old or how far her children are.

But the story came right when they left. The mourning was in my front pocket, in every cupboard I opened. Dottie’s loss was different from mine, but we shared our grief. She’s an odd character, maybe one of the strangest I’ve ever written, and yet I feel a closeness to her unlike any other. She kept me returning to the page every day. She made me laugh; she made me cry; she challenged me to think, and most importantly, she held my hand through a tough time. Toni Morrison famously said you must write the book you want to read. For me, that book was Magdalena.

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Candi Sary is the author of Magdalena, forthcoming from Regal House Publishing.