At the beach the other day, after we had gone for a walk, Graham and Natalie and I swam for a little while in the waves. Or, rather, we threw ourselves into the waves and stood back up because they were breaking hard and fast on the shore and it didn't seem prudent to push out deeper, particularly as neither of the kids are great swimmers and the flags on the beach had been red all weekend and had only just turned yellow. After a little while, I got bored and went back up to my beach chair.
Graham lingered in the waves for a while and I couldn't stop myself from watching him protectively. Which is ridiculous, he's almost 19. But he's still skinny as a rail and just has limited experience out in the world on his own. As if to prove the point, it turned out that he burnt the fuck out of his feet because he hadn't put sunscreen on them. They're better by now, but he was no happy camper Sunday evening.
This morning I dropped him off at UNC for Freshman orientation. Last night I didn't sleep so well. I woke in the middle of the night for my normal 3:30 pee break and immediately knew I should take sleeping pills -- a rare expedient. But I didn't settle back in to a normal sleep.
I honestly don't think I'm worried about him. I'm worried about me and, to some extent, Mary. How will we adjust? I am so deeply wedded to my routines, to having a kid around and parenting has just been the most thing I've been doing for north of 22 years now, so shifting into a new way of doing it is really the biggest change I've experienced since June 2000. Everybody says that empty-nesting works out pretty nicely, and he's only just uptown, and yet...
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