"I think I'm gonna tour with the band this summer. Steve's Dad bought a van off some guy in Arizona." My seventeen-year-old son Tyler dropped this on us over dinner.

"Sorry, what?" I said.

"It's not a big deal, Mom." he said.

"Well, I guess you've decided then," I said.

"I think it's great," my husband said.

Tyler got his love of music from me. An uncool thing to say, but it's true. And now it meant he'd be spending the summer before college living in a van, and not at home with us.


"He's not going to get this opportunity again," my husband said in bed that night. And of course I knew this. A person gets one shot at seventeen, at perpetual undoneness, where nothing has happened yet, so maybe it might all be great. 

So it was decided. Tyler would go on tour, and we'd say goodbye three months early.


The news hung over the rest of the spring. I watched the boys that climbed out of Tyler's car after school, clambering into our kitchen. Consequenceless, all of them, with their carabiners and guitar picks. They'd spent entire summers compiling their allowances for malt something, playing demo tapes and sitting on hoods of cars in someone's garage in Pottstown. How did Tyler even know how to get to Pottstown? Steve probably showed him.


"You're lucky to have a love for music," I said to Tyler on one of the rare nights he helped me with the bins. "It will be with you for the rest of your life." But the truth was, it wouldn't. Eventually, the shows are too late, the friends move away. Eventually, you listen to the news on your way to the office, and NPR on your way home, and the only music you hear is when you sit at the top of the stairs as your son stumbles his way through his scales, which, though objectively emotionless, is enough to crack you in half.

"Yeah, I hope so," he said.


I passed by a sign in the Hallmark store window: "A Mother's wish is for her child to be free." Wrong. A mother's wish is for her child to eat the popcorn she keeps buying for them at Trader Joe's because once when they were in 6th grade they said they liked the cheddar kind, and if she's lucky, they'll ask her if she can pick up more once a week, every week, forever. That's it, that's your sign.


"Bye Mrs. Holdsman," Steve said, Tyler in his passenger seat, off to some party. How did I not see them when I was their age? The mothers in the windows of every house I ever pulled up to, peeling back the curtain as I drove away with their hearts in my front seat? It was enough to make me want to call my own mother, but that's the cruel part. You only want to call once you can't. The consequence of love is grief.

The consequence of motherhood is Steve.


Tyler found me in the garage one night. "I'm heading to see the van. The guy just dropped it off."

"Okay, Hunny," I said. He passed me to get to his car. Squeezed my shoulder. I opened the garage door. He pulled out of the driveway the way only a young person does, with concern-lessness (not carelessness). As soon as he was gone I walked up to his bedroom. I wasn't planning to, but I did. Inside were the artifacts of a boy grown: A stick of deodorant. A spiral bound notebook. It hurt too bad, standing there, not because it was his, but because it could have been mine, my teenage bedroom, the center of my own personhood, the place where I lay and wriggled into jeans and played CDs until they essentially disintegrated. It was unbearable, and yet I thought, maybe I'll just stay here until the moment I die.

I pressed the spacebar on his computer. Whatever he was listening to last played. It was loud, percussive, clattery, but if you listened closely there was a violin that carried it all, devastatingly delicate. Soft at the center. The hook came—a single vocal carried as if up a flight of stairs, just shaky enough to be breathless. The song was like eating a piece of buttered bread and burying a friend.

This is what it sounded like—my son becoming a person. The thumbprint of his soul was this exact marking of chords. If I knew my son, he heard that violin too. But, then again, we've established that I probably didn't.

And maybe it was because he began inside of me, or maybe it was because THIS was once inside of me—not youthfulness, but, hopefulness? Suffering? Whatever this was was the very thing that makes a person: a pinhead and an ocean, ideas and wishes; a few memories, yes, but mostly, only what was ahead, and music.

I stood there, paralyzed in the eye of my kid. And then the song ended.


When he got home he handed me his sweaty flannel, ready to be washed. I got the popcorn out. Dumped it in a bowl. He walked past it. Grabbed a granola bar instead.


No one tells you that having a child will one day hurt like having a parent, but much worse, the dial cranked all the way up, the love stuck in your throat like an apple seed, but forever, the impossibility of you being both totally of each other and not each other at all stuck to you like a dull ache that has been there since the day they were born and will never not be there again.

I threw out the popcorn. Joined my husband on the couch. He fed me a scoop of his ice cream. And for another night, we were parents, tallying the shrinking list of things we could still provide our son, everyday growing less and less needed, like music.


.