Relaunch: Deja Vu, a.k.a. Fae's First Apartment

Last week, Fae came into the family room and announced: “Well, this is it, parents. I’m going to my apartment now. I officially live somewhere else.”

Gulp. Although this long-awaited event was no surprise, I have to admit that a voice inside my head whined: No, I’m not ready. But at the same time, a louder voice said: This is good, this is right, it’s time. So I swallowed down the lump in my throat, gave my beautiful firstborn a squeeze and fought tears by reminding myself that even though she won’t be sleeping under the same roof, she’s not going far. Fae’s first apartment is only a half-hour drive away. We made plans to have lunch on Thursday to discuss our blog, and that helped. She’s gone, but not really gone. Besides, her bedroom is still full of stuff, most of it all over the floor. If I miss the essence of Fae, I just need to open the door.

Now. About Fae’s first apartment. If déjà vu actually is a disturbance in the matrix, Keanu Reeves better show up soon, because I’m a little freaked out. There have to be thousands of apartment buildings in the greater Boston area. What are the odds of Fae’s first apartment being in the same town and same apartment complex where I had my very first apartment, back in 1983? This is exactly the case; a weird, spooky kind of coincidence. It wasn’t until after she signed the lease with her roommate and described the complex (a cluster of brick buildings circling a courtyard with a pool at the center) that things started sounding eerily familiar. I’d even forgotten my old address until she mentioned it.

Before Hubby and I stopped by Fae’s apartment for the first time to haul her mattress and box springs up three flights of stairs, I swear I wouldn’t have been able to find my way. Those driving directions have been buried in the “inactive” sector of my brain for 26 years. But as soon as we drove into the complex, it was like dusting off an old scrapbook. Although her building is two doors down from my old building, and she is on the third floor while I lived on the first, the apartment layout is exactly the same. And her bedroom, the smaller of the two (which I’d also inhabited, while my slightly wealthier roommate took the larger one), looks exactly like my old room. I could even offer advice on the best angle for her bed.

While Hubby sat on the floor with Fae to work on the Internet hookup, I sank into a chair and contemplated memories I hadn’t accessed for nearly three decades. During the two years I lived here, I was 24 and 25, just slightly older than Fae, working as a radio copywriter, making barely above minimum wage and eating a lot of soup. Hubby and I were newly in love and I surprised myself by thinking, ya know, I could marry this guy. Memory snapshots came to me, of parties with friends, playing my guitar, drinking wine with my roommate, and having dinner with the couple down the hall.

And as I watched Hubby with Fae, I also felt a pang of jealousy. She has the luxury of having her parents nearby to help as she begins her new life. When I was her age, my parents were in the midst of a heart-breaking divorce. They were hundreds of miles away, both literally and emotionally. There was no way I could call on Dad to help set things up in my apartment, or have lunch with Mom on a random Thursday. Sure, it forced me to be independent. But there was also an element of loss.

So, although our journeys are different, what is identical for Fae and me at that age, (in addition to the weirdly coincidental street address), is the fact that the twenty-something years represent a time of huge transformation. It reminds me of books I read when Fae was a toddler, chronicling the amazing changes that occur in the first few years of life. Surely these next years will be equally transformative. But instead of first steps, first teeth, and first words, it will be new friendships, romances, life experiences and career changes that will color the rest of her life.

- Callie

Relaunch: On the Launch Pad

This is a blog about a mother (me) and a daughter (Fae), as we contemplate the question: What the hell do I do with the rest of my life?

When my daughter Fae, who is 23 and a recent college graduate, told me she wanted to write a blog chronicling her launch into adulthood, with its gut wrenching combo of excitement, terror and confusion, I felt an empathetic jolt. Stepping into unknown, uncharted waters? Hmm, that sounds familiar. Feeling like the rest of my life is a puzzle, but I lost the box cover so I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like? Uh huh. Wishing someone would hand me a script and say, “Just do this, you’d be great at it!” Oh god, yes.

I am a 51 year old, middle-aged empty nester (gulp, to all of that), looking ahead to the second half of my life with few clues on how to proceed, both professionally and personally. It’s like being 23 all over again, but old.

So I suggested to Fae that we write a mother/daughter blog, to share this experience of launching and re-launching together. Maybe, I suggested, the blogging process could help us along in this journey. Maybe both people her age and those my age would be interested to follow our tandem triumphs and struggles. Plus, it would be fun. Happily, Fae said yes, and we immediately scheduled some fun “business meetings” at restaurants and cafes in our town.

To start, I will say it is my hope that Fae’s initial journey will turn out like mine for the first almost-50 years of my life. After floundering for a while myself after graduation in 1980 (happens to most of us, my Fae), I settled into a career in radio and freelance journalism. Then, Hubby and I got married in 1984. He was a great catch, a guy I met in college choir, and re-met in Boston two years later. Next came family. Fae first, in 1986. Her little sister, I’ll call her BabyGirl, came along in 1988. I had a creative, fulfilling job, a kind and thoughtful husband who made me laugh, a home in the ‘burbs, and two healthy, beautiful daughters. All of this felt like The Way Life Should Be. And for us, it was. It worked for a long time.

But fast forward twenty-some years, to just about the time I turned 48, and I see myself thrown out of my orbit, losing momentum and clarity. To sum up, within about a three-year period: we sold a house, bought a house and moved, Hubby and I each hit the half-century mark, our marriage hit the quarter-century mark (and some unexpected rocky patches to go with it), both daughters left the nest for college, I took a break from my regular work to get a masters degree in creative writing and write two novels, my father-in-law died, my mother went into assisted living, Hubby was laid off from a job he’d had for 27 years and got another job, Hubby was laid off from that job, and got a consulting gig, and I tried a stint in corporate life that bombed in epic style.

Wow. Written out like that, all dry and pat, squeezes the life and heart struggles out of each of these events. Even the good things meant major change (and I hate change – transition makes me disoriented and cranky), and as for the bad stuff, I’m still trying to get the license plate of the truck that hit me.

Ironically, the event that I hoped would further my career—going to grad school—ended up throwing me off course. I’d been writing freelance articles for publications like The Chicago Tribune, and Shape magazine, but I set it all aside to focus on fiction writing for a few years. I don’t regret this for a nanosecond; grad school and fiction writing were my passion and obsession. However, I lost momentum with my other work along the way.

Which brings me to the present. When I came up for air after writing the first draft of novel #2 and decided (due to the economy, Hubby’s uncertain job situation and my own empty-nest restlessness) this would be a great time to return to the workforce, I discovered not only that my former editors and other contacts had moved on while I was busy doing other things, but that the industries I used to know have changed dramatically.

Radio and newspaper. Need I say more? These are two fields that are lumbering like aging dinosaurs toward a tar pit, and if I don’t plan to follow them there, I need to recreate my professional self, stat.

I am 51 years old (damn, that still stings), with skills I don’t know how to plug into the millennial world. Plus, I have suffered some setbacks that have lowered my resistance and made me susceptible to bouts of immobilizing blues. Feeling lost and frustrated and scattered are common states for me these days. Even so, on a good day, I’m able to tap into rich stores of excitement and hope for the future. And If I can figure out how to coax them to life, I have ideas and dreams that will carry me there.

But now as I write this, I stand poised on my launch pad, waving at Fae over there on hers. We’ve started building our rocket ships, and soon we’ll be aiming for the stars. Just watch us.

-Callie

Launch: Here We Go

So. I'm finally getting out on my own. A friend of mine and I signed the lease for our new apartment and have been slowly moving all our crap over for the past week or so. During this week my parents have been away, so I've had a little time to reflect and sort of ease myself into the idea of being out in the real world.

I'm not doing a very good job so far. I haven't even started packing yet, and it was my idea to do this whole blog thing, and I've been putting off actually writing it all week. I'm not sure why, either. Maybe because if I start looking through my things and putting down my thoughts on...well not paper, but typing them out, at least, then it will be real. I have a terrible problem with procrastination. I figure if I avoid things then I won't have to deal with them. Which, of course, always backfires terribly because things build up and then I'm scrambling at the last second to get a thousand things done. I really need to pack. And my parents will be home in about fifteen minutes!

But anyway, the point of this blog is to talk about my journey into adulthood or whatever. I'm 23 years old, I graduated from college in May (after four years, an extra semester, and a summer class), and I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up. During college I looked forward to graduation with a mixture of impatience and sheer terror. I struggled with depression and undiagnosed ADD throughout college and so I didn't do as well as I could have, and looking back now I regret so much of those four years. But somehow I made it through, and here I am, standing on the other end, and quite frankly, I'm lost.

I am the proud owner of a BA in English. The first thing everyone asks me when I tell them that is "Are you going to be a teacher?" I have absolutely no desire to teach, and...very few ideas about what else I want to do. I did an internship at a Literary Agency the summer after my sophomore year of college, so maybe I'll try to get a job at some kind of a publishing company but...I really don't know. And I'm running out of time to decide. At the moment I'm working at a bookstore and for the next week or so I'm doing the paper route in my parents' neighborhood. Which I hate. But I need a real job. One that pays enough to pay rent and has medical benefits and oh my god I'm an adult.

I'm not quite over it yet. But there are things I'm looking forward to. My new roommate and I went shopping for all our kitchen and bathroomy stuff the other day and it was really exciting to buy plates and pots and pans and an amazing red microwave and imagine being out on my own. I'll miss the comforts of living with my parents, but there is something exhilarating about finally being on my own and independent.

So this blog is about my journey from terrified launchee into...hopefully some semblance of a well-adjusted, self-sufficient adult. I have high hopes, even if I have no idea where the path I'm on is leading me. It will definitely be a struggle, but what is anything worth if it comes easily? And as it turns out, my mom, dealing with her empty nest, is as a crossroads in her own life. Both of us are stepping out into the unknown and thank god we have each other to hold onto as we go.So I guess this is where we begin.

-Fae