I took Saoirse to see the Dartmouth Campus.  She was more interested in watching the squirrels racing and playing in the quad.  I took her to my alma maters, SUNY Binghamton and Cornell.  There, she was more interested in finding good coffee and the best Korean food.  I suggested a paddling trip up near Paul Smiths, thinking I could surreptitiously slip in a campus tour. She took me up on the paddling trip.  When we pulled in to Paul Smiths, she got as far as the visitor center bathroom.  Seen enough.  I took her to a meeting about our SUNY Online university, Empire State College. No moving away to college, no dorm living, no campus dining, no in-person lectures.  She could continue her job on the farm and in the cafe.  

She asked where to sign and danced all the way home.  

The apple did  not fall far from the tree, I suppose.  Quality of life has prevailed over every academic and business decision in my life.  I never wanted to be far from my family, my farm, or my kitchen.   Quality of life rules Saoirse’s life, too. She loves home-schooling for college, where she’s near her kitchen, her family, and her farm.  She spends hours and hours beside the wood stove, pot of coffee next to her laptop, reading her books, doing her coursework.  I’m thankful she has the farm chores to pull her outside each day.  

Our home has become it’s own version of a college campus.  My kitchen is the dining hall, where Bob and I have surrendered supremacy to two teenage cooks and their food whims….and the over-flowing compost bucket, counter crumbs and the soiled dishes that ensue.   The living room has become the student union, where debates about news, literature, art, boys and college professors fill the air between screenings of the latest Netflix releases.  The upstairs is a dormitory, replete with dress forms, sewing machines, heaps of clothes, and a bathroom that I refuse to clean any longer (and I’m getting increasingly frightened of using it).  My office with it’s comfy chairs and wood stove is now the library, where I greet scattered textbooks, notebooks and laptops each morning.  

I can’t say I don’t love it.  I love the conversations.  I love witnessing how Saoirse’s mind sponges up more and more information, then turns out more and more ideas.  I love helping her navigate the academic world.  Or so I thought. 

It was last Saturday night when I wondered if I might think differently.  Bob and I were having Negronis before dinner while Ula lay on the floor with the dog.  Saoirse was busy in the next room working on an essay.  She joined us briefly for dinner, then went back to her work.  As the meal finished, I stood up, ready to go enjoy some bedtime reading.  And she followed me.  “I need you to proofread this so I can turn it in,” she says, offering me her laptop.

I felt myself suddenly become resentful.  It was 8pm on a Saturday night.  I was still feeling the effects of the Negroni and supper, and I wanted to lie in bed with a book.   I didn’t want to read a college paper.  

Even though I still have two girls living in my house, I’m empty nesting in my own weird way.  I leave them to their studies and their taco experiments and sewing projects and spend hours practicing my bari sax, or sinking into a chair by the wood stove with a book and some chocolate, or sitting down at the farm with my parents, or having tea with friends.  After all these years of raising and schooling my children, I am finding that I relish detaching from their responsibilities in pursuit of my own pleasures.

But a part of me still feels responsible for their every need.  A part of me still worries about what they’re eating, about whether they’re keeping up with their online classes.  A part of me still questions whether I’ve taught them enough here at home to survive in the great wide world.  And so, when my college student daughter approaches me at 8pm on a Saturday night with a paper to look over, the part of me that, a week before her 49^th birthday, is still learning to be her own person, separate from her family, wants to shrug and walk away.  The part of me that will never stop feeling responsible as the homeschooling mom feels duty-bound to drop everything and read the research paper.  Those two parts, blended with one part Negroni, are a toxic cocktail. Suddenly I want to launch at her in anger.  I want to reprimand her for being inconsiderate of my time, for failing to plan appropriately.  Simultaneously I want to tell myself to shut up and sit down and read the damn paper and be a good friggen mom.  

Instead, I walk into the bathroom and close the door gently behind me.

I stare at myself in the mirror, draw a deep breath and consider the situation.  Saoirse is not wrong to ask a trusted person to review her paper.  I am not wrong to want to go to bed.  

What’s wrong is my anger.  

My anger comes from guilt.

My guilt comes from the part of me that thinks I’m not allowed to simply say no, not right now. 

But that’s all I have to do.  I come out of the bathroom, where she’s standing there, laptop in hand.  

“I just can’t do it tonight,” I tell her.  

To love and support my daughter most fully, I need to take care of myself so that I don’t become resentful.   I have to remember that it’s not my problem if she wanted to turn the paper in that night.  It’s not my problem if it is over-due. This is college, after all.  And if she were away at school, I couldn’t rescue her. 

Those thoughts help the guilt, resentment and anger float away from my body. As the steam clears, I can clearly see before me a loving, understanding young woman.   “I can’t possibly wrap my head around that after having one of your Dad’s Negronis,” I explain.  

She laughs.  “I get it.”

“Tomorrow?” I ask.

“Sure.  Good night, Mom.  I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Tomorrow will be another day of learning.  For both of us.