In May, my twins graduated fifth grade. Which means in seven years, they both graduate high school. Same year. Same season. Same gut-punch moment.
The thing no one talks about is that you have no heroic second tries with twins. No easing into it. No watching one kid leave, catching your breath, then bracing for the next. You can never redo anything and everything happens all at once. Walking: same year. First day of kindergarten: same year. And one day, moving out: same year.
“ …we didn’t collapse into polite agreement the way women so often do with each other.”
I’ve been sitting with that a lot lately. And by “sitting with it,” I mean occasionally spiraling at 11 pm while everyone else is asleep. It started with a conversation. A dear friend and I were talking about my daughter, the one who has wanted to move to Manhattan since approximately age four. She wants to perform, and she’s been showing me this since she could move. Somewhere between the coffee and the catching up, I floated my ‘brilliant idea’: What if we moved to New York City before she graduated? Got settled. Learned the ropes, so she wouldn’t be going in completely wide-eyed and alone at 18.
My friend didn’t blink. She immediately responded, “Tara. She’ll be fine. She needs to do this on her own. That is years away.”
I felt the heat rise in my face immediately. I had reasons. Good ones. Logical ones. The kind you line up very quickly when you are definitely not being defensive. I started listing them. She pushed back. I “yes, and”-ed her like I was in an improv class. She pushed back harder. And somewhere in the middle of that back-and-forth, something shifted. She wasn’t wrong, but it has taken me more than a few days to admit that.
I realized this entire conversation had nothing to do with New York City. And it had everything to do with controlling my grief before it arrived. Here’s what I need you to know about me: I am not an overprotective mother. At least not overtly. I type this as my daughter is currently at her first-ever seven-day sleepaway camp and I have not driven past the gates once. Not once. I know… I’m as surprised as you are. But here’s the thing—moving to a city of eight million people at 18, alone, with no map and no safety net? I mean, come on.
OK, here is where I admit that I moved to L.A. when I was 16 to pursue dance and I lasted less than a year. I did end up moving to Spain the following year at 17, but 1996 was a different world and, honestly, I lasted less than a year in L.A. What I did then isn’t necessarily what my daughter should do now. But, in all truth, this isn’t about me, about Hollywood, or about what she is capable of in 2033.
I lost my mom when she was 49. I grew up watching someone I loved leave before I was ready. And somewhere underneath my very logical, very reasonable NYC relocation plan is a quieter, older fear: What if I’m not there when she needs me? What if something happens and I’m in Colorado and she’s in Manhattan and I can’t get there fast enough? What if I run out of time the way my mom did?
With twins, the anticipatory grief doesn’t trickle in. It arrives all at once. I don’t get to practice. I don’t get a warm-up round. I get one moment: one graduation, one set of moving boxes, one goodbye—and then I’m rattling around a house that used to hold four people. A house that, just a few years ago, couldn’t contain all the noise.
That’s what I was grieving in that conversation. Not the logistics of New York. The leaving. The speed of it. The fact that I can already feel it coming and I can’t slow it down. I think what I actually needed at that moment wasn’t a debate. It was to be asked a deeper question: “Tara, what are you really afraid of?”
But here’s the gift I didn’t expect. She pushed back. And I pushed back. And we didn’t collapse into polite agreement the way women so often do with each other. We stayed in it. We ruffled a few feathers and came out the other side still friends, still laughing, still thinking. I want more of that. More spaces where it’s okay to not agree. Where grief can show up in the middle of a conversation about New York City and nobody has to pretend it’s just about New York City. Because anticipatory grief is sneaky like that. It disguises itself as a parenting plan, a relocation idea, a very reasonable suggestion that your friend will absolutely not let you finish explaining. It shows up in the heat rising in your face when someone challenges you. It lives in the over-explained defense of an idea that was never really about the idea.
I see you, grief. I know you’re coming. And I’m learning—slowly, imperfectly, and apparently with a fully-packed moving van idling in my imagination—that the answer isn’t to outrun you or outsmart you or move my whole family to New York City to soften your landing. The answer is to feel you now, a little at a time, so that when the goodbye actually comes, I’m not meeting you for the first time.
