Hannah’s Move-In Day

We dropped our oldest off at college this week.  Hannah is now a freshman at Manhattan College.  Go Jaspers!

I’m not gonna lie.  It hit me a lot harder than I thought that it would.  This old house of ours feels a little too big and a lot too empty right now.  Because Hannah’s the one who tends to hang out with me the most.  Over the past year or more -- since the pandemic hit, forcing Sally to start her own fitness studio out in our former garage -- Hannah has been the one helping me make dinner most nights.  She’s the one who always wants to tell me about her day, who goes to the beach with me when it’s 90° outside, when we’re all sweaty and miserable because our 100-year-old house doesn’t have central air conditioning.  Hannah’s the one who’s really been around during the pandemic.  I don’t think I’d realized how much I’d come to rely on her company until she was gone.  It’s all too easy to fall into these little routines of domesticity when you live together as a family.  But man oh man, once those routines are disrupted, you really feel it.

I did, at least.

I keep thinking back to the day Hannah was born.  

Onboard the *real* Thomas the Tank Engine

By the time Sally and I met, we were both ready for a family.  I was 29, had already been married and divorced, and was well into my third career.  I’d long since bought and sold my first house.  I’d actually moved a dozen or more times over the preceding two years and had even lived out of my car as a bachelor Army officer in between assignments and then again as a relocating logistics consultant.  I’d spent 13 weeks living in the Hartford Hilton before being laid off when the Dot-Com Bubble cracked.  I landed on my feet in New York, but it took a good long time before I found any sense of belonging.  When Sally said, “This is serious for me.  I’m not just playing around,” I knew exactly what she meant.

We were never just a couple, really.  Sally fell pregnant on our honeymoon, so we were a family almost from the moment we got married.  However, Hannah’s birth was a chaotic and frightening event.  She turned her head in the final moments of labor and got stuck in the birth canal, necessitating a wildly unplanned emergency c-section.  Sally was pushing one minute, and in the next, the nurses were wheeling her out almost without explanation, leaving me alone and scared in a dark hospital room.  They brought Hannah out maybe ten minutes later and stuck her in a pan under a small warming light, looking for all the world like a pre-cooked chicken at the grocery store.  We stood there like that just the two of us for an hour or more.  No explanation, no nothing.  I thought for sure that I was about to be a single father.

She held my finger as I spoke quietly to keep her calm.  I had no idea what we were going to do.

It all worked out, obviously.

But then we were a family in truth, and it’s been like that for damn-near 18 years.

UTEP at Army, 2016.  This feels like yesterday.

It’s so easy to take someone for granted when they’re in your life every day, day in and day out.  That’s how I feel right now.  But the truth is that I took a job without a lot of travel and with manageable hours on purpose.  I wanted to be home -- and involved -- every day in my kids’ lives.  That was what I wanted.  My kids haven’t had to move every two years the way that I did.  They’ve had that sense of home and of belonging that has eluded me throughout most of my life.  

Now, though, with the one kid grown and the next heading into her junior year of high school, I can see that this part of my mission is coming to an end.  I’ve known that it would be for a while, and I’ve tried to reinvest in my marriage and in myself.  I really have.  I’m trying to look forward to having more time with my wife for just the two of us.  After all this time, we deserve that.

The star of the show: Hannah as Annie in 5th grade.

Still, that loss of identity is hard.  I feel it anew every time I walk by Hannah’s empty room.  Not that she and Emma won’t still need me to be their father, but it’ll never be the same.  I remember vividly the emotions of reporting to West Point and of finding my own place in the world.  I still loved my parents, of course, and at some level, I still needed them.  But I also remember knowing in my bones that I’d become my own man -- irrevocably -- for better or worse.  I often see both my own best and worst traits reborn in Hannah especially, and I know that I’ll see this one as well.  It is what it is.

The days pass by so fast.  One day you’re holding your daughter’s hand, wondering if you’re about to become a single father and overwhelmed at the possibilities.  The next, you’re standing before the *real* Thomas the Tank Engine, watching that same daughter have a religious experience as her hero pulls a real passenger train up a short one-way track in Darien, Connecticut.  After that, you’re leading your little troop through the wilds of Acadia National Park, talking about your Dungeons and Dragons characters and creating the adventures that will become familial touchstones through the coming years.  Then you’re teaching your daughter to drive, picking her up from the prom, talking her through her first full-time job, and finally dropping her off at college in one long rush of moments.

Schoodic Head, Acadia National Park, playing D&D.

More family D&D, this time in our backyard.

All you can do is look back at those moments and hold fast.

She’s still my daughter.  I know that.  But one thing is over, and the next thing has begun, and I haven’t quite found my footing with it yet.  

I don’t know what comes next.

Move in day.  Sally took her because I had to work.  Probably just as well.

I’m not gonna lie.  I am really, really looking forward to AEW Dynamite tonight.  That’s the thing that Emma and I do together these days, the thing that’s just ours’.  Wrestling was our pandemic project.  

I need it right now more than I’ve needed just about anything.  I’ll worry about what comes next after it’s over.