Jonathan has been away for two days and two nights now visiting his parents -- playing the first out-of-town gig of our farewell tour. I was thinking of getting t-shirts made, but then we would just have more clothes to pack and, frankly, I'm starting to run out of boxes.

For a long time, I have thought of having children as a very long, very hard lesson in learning how to say goodbye. Giving birth, ironically, was the first goodbye -- saying farewell to the child who was living inside my body where I knew they were warm and safe, and letting them depart to the big outside world where they would cry (inevitably) and be hurt (inevitably) and where I would often be powerless to fix what was wrong (inevitably). Then sending them off to school and the first overnight at a friend's house and the first time they drove a car all by themselves (made even more truly horrifying by my having so recently experienced their driving skills up close and personal as a passenger) and then off to college, which was exciting for them and exciting but also heartbreaking for me.

There was this one moment when I took Tris off to college, sitting in his dorm room waiting for time to go to the opening convocation, after which I would leave him. He was sitting at his institutional/functional dorm room desk, reading through the contents of his Welcome Packet. I was sitting on his functional/institutional dorm room bed looking out the window at his new sky. It was quiet except for the muffled sounds of the functional institution around us coming through the cinder block walls as other people went about their business. I thought, "This is very familiar to me -- I have done this before with this child." And I realized that I was remembering the day he was born, holding him in the functional/institutional hospital room, waiting for my parents to come and bring Aiden to meet his new brother and for us to go home together to begin our new life. He was quiet then, too, and my heart was breaking with love then, too.

Right at this moment, they are both hundreds of miles away from me. Tris is even on the other side of an international border. They are both well. They are both happy enough. So why do I feel this sense that I am once again saying goodbye to them?

We got a mouse in one of our permanently out and baited no-nonsense-because-mice-carry-hantavirus-mouse-traps during the first night Jonathan was away. I heard the snap very clearly at 2:00 a.m. and fretted away the rest of the nighttime hours thinking about how I would have to dispose of the corpse in the morning. In our house, we have very separate magisteria -- I do the taxes and take out the trash and handle the majority of the yard work. Jonathan washes dishes and bakes bread and vacuums. But dealing with spiders and dead mice is definitely his domain. Alas, he is away on tour and I am the only one here. So I did what I had to do. But my spinal cord insisted that I scream my head off the whole time I was doing it. Screaming at mice is the only traditional gender role performance at which I truly excel.