Waiting Out Empty

September is a soft and warm word for a soft warm month, and it was a good season to be empty. 

Just...empty. Not running on empty, or as in drained dry, or as in devoid of emotion. None of those things. 

More like empty as in absence of fullness. Absence of people that I love. Absence of happenings. Absence of thinking that I know things. 

Because I knew a lot of things about myself before I sent my two youngest sons off to college. 

I knew I spent years sharing custody with my children's father, giving me over a decade of intermittent training in having them out of my house, out of my view, out of my attention. 

I knew I never wanted to be that dreaded of all creatures, the "helicopter parent," who helps with freshman homework, emails college professors, and desperately clings to tasks that rightfully belong to their now nearly adult children. 

I knew I wanted a next chapter, one that perhaps belonged a little bit more to me than to my children. But it always seemed to me, year after year, that there were thousands of leaves to turn before we reached that particular page, that new direction in the storyline-- so I kept reading. Until now. I'm finding that I can't read any further. The aptness of my metaphor and my knowledge about myself have faded, running out like too little ink on dry paper.  

All of that knowing wasn't enough to prepare me for the large quiet space that opened up in my life when they began college, one at the "other" public university on the other side of the state, and another at a community college 45 minutes away. At first, that quiet space loomed like an entire undiscovered universe, especially in stark contrast to the short, noisy, and tightly wound days of packing and unpacking, driving loaded trucks, navigating two crowded campuses just days apart, and the rapid fire artillery of problem solving. Where do you get a bus pass? How do we get your window blinds fixed? How in the world did we forget toilet paper? 

The next chapter is here, now. There are no words on the page for me to read. At least, none that I can see clearly. Yet. It's an unsettling feeling. I have ideas, but they're struggling to form themselves into something coherent. That too, seems like part of the blankness I'm confronting. 

I spent the month of September letting myself be empty-- allowing it, and even sometimes insisting to myself that I sit with that nothingness for a period of time. Sometimes I failed, and attempted to fill it (poorly) with anxiety, insomnia, NYT crossword puzzles, crap food, and too much social media. Many other times, though, I found myself fully absorbed in the details of a simple action, pruning a houseplant, brushing my hair, scrubbing a saucepan, without my mind racing on some other unrelated concern. I realized how novel and uncluttered and undiluted those actions felt, compared to other times when my life was anything but empty. 

Now it's October, and I'm waiting out the empty. I know it won't be like this forever. I imagine there will be a time in the not too distant future where I'm able to put some words to the empty-- words like grief, change, transition, aging, self-realization, reflection, and respite. I realize I'm not ready to do that just yet, and that's okay. 

In the meantime, we've begun my favorite month of the year. We've danced our way through a family wedding, and are about to embark on a new adventure-- joy is a welcome vantage point to come to terms with, and begin to fill, emptiness. Eventually the words of the next chapter will become clearer. When that happens, I will write them down. Just like I have all the times before.