So it was only natural that when our youngest left for college, I found food shopping, cooking, and mealtimes challenging. My grocery cart, which had once been filled to the top with things like Kind Bars, pretzel Goldfish and the makings for homemade granola, now included only a single loaf of bread and a couple chicken breasts. Thinking about dinner time without the girls was even worse. My fears included everything from how I would prepare food for two people to worrying that we would start eating on TV trays while watching Wheel of Fortune. After all, it was only us.
Unspoken was my deepest, darkest fear - what if we didn't have anything left to say? What if, after years of discussing school projects and the next day's schedule, we had run out of things to talk about? What if, in those nonstop years of mom-life, I had become (GASP) boring?
Those first couple weeks were tough. Deciding what to eat - a decision that had long been guided by what everyone was "in the mood for" - came down to what sounded palatable. Sitting at the nearly-empty table with a golf-ball sized lump in my throat made eating a challenge. We ate a LOT of leftovers. Through trial and error, we found out what dishes froze and defrosted well (Italian: good! Mexican: not so much.). Some nights, when we were both working late, dinner was scrambled eggs and toast, despite those two lonely chicken breasts sitting in the fridge. We navigated around each other in the small kitchen, unused to the freedom of open space. Besides the sting of the empty seats at the table, it just felt ... odd.
As the days turned into weeks, though, a new normal began to take shape. I'm a firm believer that given enough time, people can get used to anything, and dinner time at the Palmer house was no exception. We've fallen into a routine of sorts... chatting in the den while dinner simmers, or one of us hanging out in the kitchen, cocktail in hand, while the other does meal prep. It took some getting used to cooking for two, but we still don't own TV trays, and almost every night dinner is at our kitchen table.
Occasionally, one of the girls will call during dinner and it is almost like old times.We put them on speaker phone and for a few minutes we can pretend that all of us are sitting down together. When the phone call ends, I sigh and look wistfully at their empty spot.
But the new normal kicks back in, and suddenly we are back to just us, where the kitchen is a little quieter, but the biggest fear, the one I didn't dare speak aloud, proved to be completely unfounded. Although our dinner discussions no longer include "20 Questions" style grilling of teenage girls, it turns out we have a lot to talk about. Apparently, I'm not boring (yay me!), at least not to my husband of 28 years. We laugh a lot. Thirty years of inside jokes means that often one of us will start to speak and the other will burst out laughing, because we know what's coming next.
Unlike the occasional punchline at dinner, we don't know what's coming next. As old routines give way to new, I struggle to embrace the unknown even as I know, in my heart, that things will never be like they were. But as the "new normal" has shown me, I may not know what's coming, but the future is wide open, and it's up to me to embrace it.
