Before She Leaves
How to ready everything for an adult child’s departure
Karli comes in the house to use the bathroom while I’m recording audio for my newsletter, and I tell her, “I can’t wait for you to leave.”
I have made the decision to save being sad for when my daughter is gone.
When she gets the call that she has an apartment, I am legitimately excited with her. I’m not even faking it a little. I tell her how great it’s going to be to finally have my alone time. It’s to make the separation easier—this emphasis on the bright side. After all—creative work doesn’t thrive in an environment that is constantly interrupting me.
Last week, I googled enmeshment to make sure that it’s not how I am with her. I don’t know why that scares me—I know where I end and she begins. I just like to have her around, and I like to tell her my stories and see how she reacts. It makes them better—telling them to her. I was worried about the enmeshment because I cried for too much of this one day. It bled into my work. It’s bleeding into my work as we speak.
There are psych terms for every mistake we think we might have made as parents. Was it ‘parentification’ when she was eight years old and woke me up to take her to school instead of the other way around? It worked for us because I worked nights. I’ve stopped running through the lists of ways I might have fucked her up. These days, I pat myself on the back for providing adversity. The rest is for her and her future therapist to sort out.
It’s not like I trust psychologists anyways.
My mom has a master’s in organizational psychology and says I am perfect. I dropped out of my bachelor’s English program, and I say Karli is perfect. Karli is going to school to be an art educator and says her cat is perfect. We are all correct. Let the rest of the world argue otherwise. You know it will.
On the way to REI, I tell my sister, Jess about my plan to give a speech at Karli’s going-away party.
“Why do you need to give a speech?”
“Because I need to tell everyone who helped me…how…,” I’m so touched by my explanation for why I need to give the speech that I choke on my words and can’t finish telling her why it needs to happen. “Maybe I can’t give a speech.”
That’s a thing, though. I’ll think of something touching I could do to tell someone how much they mean to me. It ends with me and doesn’t extend to the person outside of my head. I’ll imagine writing a letter—how I’ll press flowers from my garden on the stationary where I hand-pen all the words that explain exactly what I mean when I say you are perfect and everything, and I am so glad you’re here. Or I’ll write a song for you and learn how to sing like the cute old lady with the meatballs in The Wedding Singer.
I don’t know that I’ll be able to give a speech. As a writer, you’d think my love language would be words of affirmation, but I think it might be acts of service. Once I start saying how I feel, it might come out all crazy and broken, the instrument cracks, and everyone will discover I’m dramatic and weird. Instead, I will clean the garden for her.
I know that in a previous letter, I declared that I was going to mess it up, but I only said that because I felt a little bad for how nice I’m going to make it. Bad because she’ll have her head on a swivel, in the perfect garden, surrounded by people who love her, and then she must leave.
It will be the first party I’ve thrown since the last time I got black-out drunk. I blended up berries and sugar to drop into everyone’s champagne. It was love, booze, charcuterie, darkness, and then the morning after. I woke and wondered if I had a concussion. It led me to the therapist who taught me how to moderate (I turned to abstinence when successful moderation proved to be boring and dumb). I guess that’s when the mistrust of therapists began.
I’m sorry about the next sentence.
Someone walking their dog past my house just said, “Spencer Pratt did a bang-up job.” She had on bright orange track pants and a white T-shirt.
An anonymous neighbor complained to the city about our yard. I have a theory that it’s the two men whom I’ve watched pick up neighborhood trash. I think they live in the brand new million dollar townhomes. Whenever I see them, I think of David Sedaris, who also walks around his village (he lives in England) picking up trash. I’m never close enough to tell my guys with the trash-picking poles how lovely they are.
One day, as I exit my gate at the start of my run, they pass through the intersection in front of me. I prepare my face with a smile, ready to greet them, introduce myself and become their new best friend. They aim their eyes straight ahead, stone-cold and set against making eye-contact.
I turn around, aghast and watch them walk past my house. One of them ducks as he passes the lowest branch of my tree (WHICH IS AT LEAST A FOOT ABOVE HIS HEAD). That’s when I realize they must be the ones who called the city. Now my yard has three enemies.
I love the overgrown look at peak spring, but things start to brown in the summertime. When I tell Karli’s dad we are throwing a party, he asks if I need help and specifically mentions the yard. We are a corner lot, so it is no small thing. If it were a typical yard with a rectangle of grass and a few bushes, I’d get out the weed-whacker and call it a day. Like everything I create, it’s a little wild and unkempt. It’s a combination of plants I’ve put in the ground, seeds I’ve scattered, and surprises that spring up every year. It’s a delight and every square inch is a thing to be considered. I feel guilty for deciding which plants deserve to live and which deserve to die based off of how pretty their flowers are.
The fact remains, though, that if you let certain plants grow too high and in too large of a concentration, people will think you are white trash—not to mention that it is rude to create so much kindling in a crowded southern California neighborhood. So for the next couple of weeks, before she leaves, I’ll be weeding, pruning, planting, and mulching. It will be carnage.
My stomach will hurt.
But it must be done.
I must prove my love to my daughter and everyone who helped me raise her. Most of all, I must prove to those David Sedaris garbage picker-uppers that I am not white-trash and how dare they.
Coming up
Next week’s newsletter will be for paid subscribers only. In it, I will include the after-pictures of the yard, the escape plan for the two-job situation, which includes a sick motivational growth chart that is also a race between two data-points, full disclosure on what an indie publishing income can look like if you are weird and not very good at it, and the story of how I unwittingly got my boss to spill hot sauce all over a white chair that I had already spilled hot sauce all over.
Are you lost? Here is some context in case you missed it.
More about what it’s like to send your adult child off into the world. This is the post where I lied and said I plan to mess the yard up:
I mentioned that my yard has three enemies. In this essay from three years ago, I tell of the sad yard across the street and submit to you a warning against having a fig tree.
Julie, this is such a precise portrait of the strange work of preparing for a child’s leaving: saying “I can’t wait” while grief quietly bleeds into everything, planning a speech that may be too tender to survive delivery, and somehow translating love into weeding, pruning, planting, and mulching. The garden works beautifully here because it holds the whole emotional mess without explaining it too neatly: pride, separation, gratitude, neighbor judgment, old stories, and the desire to make a place beautiful before someone steps out of it. I especially appreciated the honesty of saving the sadness for later, because that feels true to the way parents sometimes keep functioning until the departure finally gives them permission to feel what has been gathering. Grateful for the humor, ache, and wild specificity in this.
I love the overgrown look, too. It breaks my heart the way our landlords seem to be at war with the tropical plants and trees trying to overtake our house.
My heart goes out to you, Julie! Every time you write about your relationship with Karli, I am in awe. The mother-daughter friendship and bond you have feels magical and otherworldly to me. ❤️