Sometimes, when we are lucky, we get a chance to reflect that we are standing on the precipice of something new. It’s that half-second before life flips to a new chapter and we’re right there, watching it happen in real time.
For me, those moments always feel like they would make for a very dramatic scene in a movie, like my parents driving away from my dorm my freshman year of college, the seconds before the doors opened for me to walk down the aisle to Alex, parking in front of the school to walk in and meet The Kid, being buzzed into the NICU to peer at The Baby in his incubator for the first time.
They are the moments that I was distinctly aware that my life was changing right before my eyes. No soundtrack, no announcer, just a quiet whisper that things will never be the same.
I added another such moment to my list today.
After I picked them up from school for the last time, The Baby’s nurse laid on the rug in the playroom and submitted her final note to the nursing agency, something that she has done every weekday for the last five years. I laid next to her and we marked the consequential moment together. She loaded stuff in her car and then we sat on the stoop of our front porch.
In preparation for this transition, we’ve both been crying off and on for weeks, so that our heads wouldn’t explode from grief today, during this moment, that we knew was coming.
“Five years…,” she said, looking down the street.
“Five years,” I repeated. “Feels like a lifetime ago. Look at how all of us have grown.”
In companionable silence, we watched The Baby writhe around in the too tall grass in the front yard. I’d created a board book for her and The Baby that we’d purposefully looked at yesterday, knowing that we would both be crying about it. He was indeed still very much a baby when she started with him shortly before Kindergarten. A different boy from the fifth grader who began school this week.
I feel supremely grateful to have known her, to have learned Swahili so I could make her laugh at inappropriate moments in doctors’ offices, to have a woman who cared for my son, and me, so much. I will miss her Post-it notes everywhere reminding us of what needs to be done. Her singing and clapping to the Baby while he watched her, entranced. Her call through the house in her recognizable mix of the Queen’s English and her Kenyan roots, “Uh-oh, MEE-STAH POOPIE!”
There on the stoop, we laughed and cried and leaned on each other while the boy that we both love laid on his back and watched the tree limbs blow in the wind.
Finally, she stood up, wiping the grass from her pants.
“Well, I won’t see you Monday,” she said, tears running down her face.
“No, but I’ll see you soon,” I said, tears running down mine.
We hugged the hug of friends who know that their lives are about to change, hopefully for the better. She gave The Baby one final embrace. He climbed in her lap and squeezed her neck tight.
I collected The Baby from the yard and sat him on the stoop next to me.
She got in her car.
I waved.
She waved.
She drove away.
And all three of us flipped the page to a new chapter.
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