When they left home it was as if I gave birth a second time, and I say second because in my mind that first time at the hospital was only one birth. Living alone for the first time in my life seemed just as revolutionary a moment, though without that same joy, as if I’d passed into a realm of continuous worry. It’s strange that maternal anxiety grows with time, that you get worse with the years. I’d have thought the opposite, but how can we bear the distances, the absences, the silences our own children generate?
