I’m not sure what this space is anymore, or who I will be in a month, a year, a season. My creativity is dead. Missing. On a long hiatus. I blame death, the vagaries of aging, the imminent departure of the boy, who will not be in this house by this time next week.

I’ve followed the rule of threes for 18 years now. We’re whittling it down to two, then one, then none. The fall will be confusing and chaotic. Rebirth, reinvention, is mandatory. On optimistic days, I see the changes ahead as an opportunity to reconnect with the parts of myself I have allowed to atrophy. Who am I at my core? More than a mother. More than a partner. I am an uneasy friend. An absent artist. A professional drone.

It’s not just the pulls of home responsibilities that have worn me down. It’s the job, all grays and softness, where my only viewpoint is one of support and compassion, a supposed expert in the ways of the mind and heart. In addition to ruining me for anything but silence and depth (I barely have the energy or patience to maintain most friendships and family relationships outside of an increasingly shrinking circle), it has made it difficult for me to adopt the necessary clarity of a writer. How can anyone be fairly summed up in a few pithy sentences? How could I dare speculate about the complexities of another human’s psyche? We are large and contain multitudes. Words are powerful. They illuminate my experience. But my words can box others in, remove their subjectivity.

To survive, I have to shake this mindset off, fling it out of my system. I have to have faith that there is something left in me worth sharing. On the positive side, I’ve been inhaling books of all kinds. That has to count for something, the ingestion of other peoples’ metaphors, their worlds, their beautiful, complex simplicity.