What I threw out before my kids came home

Before everyone’s home for winter break, I rearrange things to feel like there’s enough room. Picture: my two kids plus one kid’s boyfriend, and me, and most nights Nino, in an apartment that’s 1,000 square feet. Of course, there isn’t enough room. But after years of very small apartments, some things are normal for us: beds doubling as sofas, dinners on top of unfinished puzzles, cafés as a source of solitude.

Everything the three of us own together would fit into a very small U-Haul. So I have to make sure they’re coming home for something besides the familiarity of their stuff. My routine panic is that my kids will stop coming home if it doesn’t feel like home.

I’m inclined to self-harm to relieve the panic, but I can’t do anything the kids will notice. Instead, I throw out things that mean something to me. They don’t mean something while I’m throwing them out. I feel like they mean something to someone else who is stupid. Not to me.

The kids know I have a throwing-out problem. I don’t throw out their stuff. Instead, I throw out boxes and boxes of wrapping paper and ribbon I’ve been collecting for a decade. Hanukkah is over. Gift wrapping is stupid. That’s what I tell myself.

I told Z I’d pick him up at the airport. I actually hate picking up anyone at the airport, but I recognize that I’m blind to most normal expressions of empathy, so if I act on every single one I notice, I might reach 50% normal empathy. Which is #goals for me.

On the way there, I watch videos of parents talking about kids who died from fentanyl. Kids turn to drugs when they’re desperate for a solution. You can always tell from the story where the parent lost connection to their kid. I watch the videos to scare myself into staying connected even when it’s hard.

When I see Z, I feel oddly shy. Like I have to remember how to be a mom again. Hugging him is a good reminder for my body.

I tell him that fentanyl is killing so many kids that it’s classified as a chemical weapon. He looks at me like I’m crazy. He says, “In Boston you can bring any bag of drugs to a center to find out what’s in it. No questions asked.”

Is him knowing this good or bad? Also, I have to remember not to try to connect by sharing information. Data is not emotional glue.

When we get to our apartment, he’s happy to see a spot for his stuff. I don’t tell him that it’s where the wrapping paper used to be. But then he needs to wrap the Hanukkah presents he brought us. He says, “Are you okay? You loved your bows and ribbons.” Then he says, “I guess it was another person who loved them.”

Probably the real reason my kids will stop coming home is there is so much that cannot be explained, except by the fact that I have multiple personalities. My kids will probably get sick of having to figure out what motivates me. I’m sick of it, too.

I don’t try to do anything while the two kids are home. I have to focus on what they need. I have to remember to do things like keeping food in the fridge. I have to go to the common area of our building to do phone calls. I have to start thinking about dinner an hour before, so that I look like I care about family dinner.

We order out a lot. It’s hard for me to be a present, caring, connected parent, even when it’s my only task. Today I make three grilled cheeses without burning one. The kids know I have a grilled cheese problem and they appreciate my focus.

While eating, they tell me they got training at school because they’re Latino.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Mom, ICE doesn’t care if you’re a citizen.”

The kids are at schools in Boston and North Carolina. This wasn’t the overlap I expected. How did I not know?

After dinner they play League of Legends and I watch. The game fascinates me because you have to memorize 150 roles, but player enjoyment isn’t about a specific role. It’s about whether you have empathy for your teammates.

It turns out that playing League is a status symbol among college kids. Brown, Duke, and Northwestern each have a League team. Yale has two. At Oberlin, the musicians play. Z spends his whole break teaching a friend who’s a violinist how the game works.

The violinist makes very little progress, but Z doesn’t care because he just got a new computer. This is the first computer he’s bought with his own money. Which is good, because I don’t have any.

But what will be my role in my kids’ lives if I’m not paying money? Attention. I tell myself to pay attention. Be emotionally available.

Z tells me he really appreciates that I didn’t throw out the boxes from the computer.

I tell him I knew he’d need packaging to bring it back to school.

He says, “I don’t want to play games at school. Only on break. I’m keeping the computer here.”