By Susannah Q. Pratt
@ohsusannahpratt 

I have been slowly stripping Oliver’s room of Oliver. The green Simpsons poster featuring Comic Book Guy has come down along with Key and Peele, and the Rolling Stones in their velvet smoking jackets. A vintage Farm Aid poster remains out of reach high above his dresser, secured with poster gum. Same challenge with the blue and red Grateful Dead tapestry thumbtacked to the molding. For the time being, they stay.

Why do I feel it necessary, all this dismantling? Oliver will return—has returned today in fact. Life with a college kid is like an airport, all arrivals and departures. I don’t know that I’m built for it. My kids are still my kids, circling, looking for a place to land. My forever impulse is to make a nest for them to touch down in, so they do. But then they take off again, leaving me with a mess of sticks and bark that feels like ours but not exactly like mine. And yet when they go, mine is what I’m left with. Nothing is right-sized.

Please tell me when I am supposed to stop feeding and clothing and housing my children. Be honest now. Did you really ever stop expecting those things of your parents? Even after acquiring the skills to feed and clothe and house yourself, after achieving whatever counted as independence, wasn’t there always a little part of you that expected the posters to still be up in your room?

If you love something, the old saying goes, let it go. I like this idea. I am happy to let my kids go; the leaving means things are roughly on track. But the advice presumes a binary: you have the person or you don’t. The reality is different. Kids go, and then come back, and then go again for longer the next time around. Or not. It’s emotionally dizzying.

I moved into Oliver’s room when he left. I needed an office with a door, a desk that wasn’t the dining room table. It was all there for the taking. But I couldn’t do it. Oliver’s room has a bookshelf in the corner lined with Harry Potter volumes and instructional guides for amateur magicians. On the second-to-top shelf sits a Lego model of the Kwik-E-Mart and a collection of Star Wars bobble heads gifted to us by a neighbor with three daughters and not a Star Wars aficionado among them. Next to the bed, a segmented wooden crate originally intended for cassette tapes is instead populated with artisan decks of cards. These artifacts of Oliver’s childhood comfort me, give me a sense of his presence. Every time I bring up a box to fill for Goodwill, my resolve weakens.

I think I have been trying to cut something that simply needs to be unspooled. Maybe this phase of parenting is less like mission control at rocket launch, and more like flying a kite—a manipulation of the string, a letting out and pulling in. I am still a mother, full of love and instinct, but now unclear where to direct it. I move through my days lighter and yet not unencumbered—one eye always on the sky.

I pack up my things from Oliver’s desk trying, once again, to make space for him. I look around at the room that he fills and empties all at once. My gaze lands on some small black letters stuck to the wall over his desk. Oliver has spelled out a lyric, sent me a message. “Let there be songs,” the stickers read, “to fill the air.”

For now, they stay.

Susannah Q. Pratt lives in Evanston, IL with her husband, two dogs and one child still in the nest. Find her thoughts on parenting and more at www.susannahqpratt.com

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