mostlypeachiii

July actually started out really well.

My younger daughter and I went to the LA anime expo for two days. We walked around, looked at way too many things, bought some stuff we probably didn’t need, and she got me a Frieren figure I really wanted.

It was fun. Really fun.

Which makes the rest of July feel even more ridiculous.

A few days later, my foot went numb.

That was literally how it started.

Just one numb foot.

At 43, this really should not have turned into a major life event. Maybe I sat weird. Maybe I crossed my legs too long. Maybe my body was just being 43.

A normal person probably would have walked around for a few minutes and forgotten about it.

I somehow went from:

Why is my foot numb?

to:

Maybe my circulation is bad.

to:

Could this be a blood clot?

to:

Can blood clots cause strokes?

to:

Am I about to have a stroke?

Very efficient.

Once the word “stroke” got into my head, I could not get rid of it.

I started checking everything.

Did my hand feel weird?

Was my face normal?

Was I walking straight?

Was I talking normally?

Things my body had probably done a hundred times before suddenly became evidence.

And then July turned into doctor appointments, blood work, lab results, more questions, more appointments, and more blood work.

Every single time, I told myself, “Okay, once this comes back normal, I’m going to stop worrying.”

That was a lie.

One thing would come back fine, and my brain would immediately move on to something else.

Okay, but what about this number?

Okay, but why does my neck feel tight?

Okay, but what if they didn’t test the right thing?

At this point, I’d had so many blood tests that I started joking that every blood draw should come with a Dragon Ball. Seven of those, and I could summon Shenron and ask him to make this ALL go away.

I started reading about blood clots, circulation, cholesterol, triglycerides, potassium, hydration, vegetables, healthy fats, basically anything that sounded like it could keep my blood moving in the correct direction.

Drinking water suddenly had a purpose.

Eating vegetables had a purpose.

My green tea had a purpose.

My hibiscus tea had a purpose.

Apparently I was no longer just living my life. I was now personally responsible for keeping my entire cardiovascular system open for business.

Then my neck started feeling tight.

Not really painful. I could turn my head. Nothing dramatic.

Just tight.

But by then my brain had one answer for everything.

Foot numb?

Stroke.

Neck tight?

Stroke.

Head feels weird?

Stroke.

My brain was very committed to this storyline.

Eventually, though, something started bothering me more than the symptoms.

I had never been like this before.

Of course I worry. I’m a mom. Worrying is basically included in the job description.

But I had never gotten this stuck on my own health before.

So I started asking myself a different question.

What else was happening in my life?

That was when things started to make sense.

My younger daughter was about to leave home for the first time to go to a two-week long summer camp.

And about a month later, my oldest daughter was going to move into her college dorm.

My first reaction was basically:

Wait.

Am I having empty-nest anxiety?

That seemed ridiculous.

I have three kids.

One moves out. Two are still home.

That is not an empty nest.

Also, my oldest daughter’s college is only about an hour away.

An hour.

She is not moving across the country.

She is not moving overseas.

She is going somewhere close enough that if she forgets something, I can complain about freeway traffic all the way there and still drop it off the same day.

And she already plans to come home every week.

So logically, the situation was very simple.

My daughter: “I’m moving into a dorm an hour away, and I’ll be home every week.”

My brain: “Sounds good.”

My body: “I might die.”

Apparently my body does not care about math or distance.

What it understood was that my younger daughter was leaving home for the first time, and my oldest daughter was about to have another place that felt like home.

Their lives were getting bigger.

And I think mine suddenly felt different because of it.

The weird part is that I wasn’t sitting around feeling sad or crying about any of this.

I wanted my younger daughter to go to camp.

I wanted my oldest daughter to enjoy college.

I have always believed that the whole point of raising kids is to help them become independent.

We spend years teaching them to need us less.

We teach them to eat by themselves, get dressed, go to school, stay home alone, drive, make plans, make choices.

Then one day they actually start needing us less.

And apparently that part hits differently when it is your own child.

I always thought empty-nest feelings would be obvious.

I thought I would feel sad.

Maybe I would stand in someone’s bedroom and look at old photos and think, “Where did the time go?”

Instead, I was researching blood clots.

That was my version.

I didn’t think, “I’m scared my kids are growing up.”

I thought:

What if something happens to me?

And once I noticed that question, all the other questions came right behind it.

What happens to the kids?

We still haven’t bought a house.

Where are we going to live next year?

What about work?

Money?

Retirement?

My health?

Their future?

All of the things I had been putting in the “later” category suddenly felt like they had moved to the front of the line.

And that was probably the first time I really felt this:

My kids growing up also means I’m getting older.

Obviously I knew that.

But knowing something and actually feeling it are not the same thing.

When your child turns eighteen, it is not just eighteen years of her life.

It is eighteen years of yours too.

Her next chapter is starting.

And that means yours is changing whether you planned for it or not.

I think that was harder for me to deal with than any lab result.

A lab result has a number.

You can look it up.

You can ask a doctor.

You can test it again.

But there is no blood test for:

Who am I when being Mom is no longer the thing taking up almost all of my time?

That question is much harder.

So maybe my brain picked health instead because health felt easier to measure.

Was I worried about a stroke?

Great. That is something I can research.

I can get tests.

I can make appointments.

I can look at numbers.

I can keep getting blood drawn until Shenron finally shows up. But realizing that my role as a mom is changing? That is much harder to put into a chart.

Eventually, I started to understand that I wasn’t spending July predicting my own stroke.

I was having panic attacks.

The physical symptoms felt real because they were real.

The fear was real too.

I just misunderstood what I was afraid of.

For weeks, I thought this whole story was about my health.

It really wasn’t.

It was about time.

I used to think an empty nest happened when the last kid moved out and the house suddenly got quiet.

Now I don’t think it happens that neatly.

I think it starts earlier.

The first time your child goes somewhere without you.

The first time she doesn’t need your help.

The first long trip.

The first dorm room.

The first time you realize she is building a life that has parts you are not in.

Nothing dramatic has to happen.

You just slowly realize things are different.

My house is still nowhere close to empty.

People still yell “Mom” from another room.

Someone is always hungry.

Someone is always looking for something.

And since my oldest daughter plans to come home every week, I have a feeling her laundry is going to be very committed to keeping this nest full.

But something is changing.

For a long time, my life has been filled with taking care of my kids.

Now I am starting to see that, little by little, some of that space is going to come back to me.

And I am going to have to figure out what I want to do with it.

That part actually sounds kind of exciting.

I just wish my body had chosen a calmer way to tell me.

I really thought I would be the mom who waved goodbye and said, “Have fun. Text me when you get there.”

Very relaxed.

Very supportive.

Very emotionally stable.

Instead, my body decided: I might die.

Which is actually kind of funny, because Frieren is a story that spends so much time thinking about time. How quickly it passes, how differently people experience it, and how easy it is to assume you still have plenty of it.

Eighteen years sounds like a long time until you’re raising a child. Then somehow you blink, and one daughter is packing for her first two-week summer camp while another is packing for college.

For a while, I kept thinking my kids had suddenly grown up. But they didn’t. They had been growing up right in front of me the whole time. I was just finally realizing how much had changed.

Maybe that was what July was really about. Not strokes, blood tests, or all the things I convinced myself might be wrong with me. It was about realizing that time had moved forward even when I wasn’t paying attention, and that my kids weren’t the only ones entering a new stage of life. I was too.

I’m still figuring out what that next stage looks like. But I do know one thing: if life wants to teach me another major lesson, I’d really appreciate it if it could find a slightly less dramatic way to get my attention.

No numb foot. No tight neck. And preferably no more blood tests.

So that was my July.

I started it at an anime expo, happily carrying home a Frieren figure.

I ended it realizing that maybe the thing I was so afraid of losing wasn’t my health after all.

Maybe I was just learning how to let time move forward.