My leg was reaching for the first step out of the cold plunge when it happened.
Not pain. Something more like pressure. Forceful, deliberate, pushing down into my pelvic floor like a contraction without any cramping. I stood there, water streaming off me, 38-degree cold still on my skin, and thought:
That’s never happened before.
And then it happened again.
The Russian Bathhouse on 10th Street is not a wellness experience. No one is optimizing anything. The saunas are downstairs in a narrow, darkish space that feels vaguely like a dungeon, which honestly describes the energy too. It’s mostly men of all shapes and sizes huddled together sweating and talking. The whole thing feels slightly intimidating.
The Russian sauna itself makes the hairs in your nose burn the second you open the door. They keep buckets of cold water near the benches so you can drench yourself and survive another five minutes. Longer being maybe another five minutes. Ten max.
The cold plunge is 38 degrees reminding you that sometimes, hell does freeze over.
Nate and I were there the day before Faith’s final graduation ceremony from Parsons and Eugene Lang. Five years. New York. The portfolio she submitted the night before it was due.
I stood in that cold water and my body bared down and pushed. Twice.
What the f, I thought.
We cycled through the steam rooms, the dry saunas, back to the cold plunge. Thirty minutes later I told Nate I needed to sit down and chill for a minute. The endorphins were endorphining and I was feeling a high that, as a sober person, doesn’t come around very often anymore.
I looked at him and said, I feel like I did in the 90’s after taking ecstasy that was cut with heroin.
He laughed.
And then I started talking about Faith.
About how she was staying in New York. How I think I always believed she might come back, even as the visits became less frequent and her life there got bigger and more real. Even as I kept saying, and meant it, I think it’s the perfect spot for you.
Something in me still held onto a version of the story where she returned. Maybe that’s what I was feeling sitting in the cold plunge. The felt and unfelt.
I don’t think I realized how much until I was sitting half naked on a granite bench in a towel crying in a Russian bathhouse while my pelvic floor tried to spiritually birth something from my body.
From the moment Faith was able to hold a crayon in her hand, she didn’t let go. With as much focus as she could muster, she would scribble while laying on her belly on the floor, upright in her stroller, from the high chair at restaurants.
When my ex-husband and I were setting up her 529, he wanted to choose University of Colorado Boulder. I didn’t want to pick a school.
What if our daughter ends up being an artist and wants to study in Paris? Then what are we supposed to do?
I don’t know if you call that mother’s intuition or what, and I’m certainly not trying to take any credit, but… I wasn’t wrong.
The acceptance letter from Parsons arrived and it was decided. Faith would move to New York in the fall of 2021 and I would officially be living alone.
However, it was still pandemic times and college kids were spending more time at home than usual. Which worked for me.
Between shutdowns, holidays, me going up there and her coming back home, we never went more than a month apart. Just when I would find myself feeling sad or getting itchy we would reunite.
(Is this giving co-dependency or what.)
Then the visits stretched further apart. The coming home became less and the reality of her staying longer in New York became more obvious.
When she started talking about living there permanently I didn’t say anything other than, I think it’s the perfect spot for you.
However true that was, it’s not what I was thinking.
I can’t even say deep down I wanted her to move back home because it wasn’t deep down. It was right there on the surface. I just knew better than to say it.
This weekend wasn’t mine to make about what I was feeling. It was her accomplishment. Her ceremonies. Her time.
I kept it on her.
And I genuinely was proud. Beyond proud. Watching her move through the city, her classrooms and ceremonies fully herself. The first of us on my mother’s side of the family to graduate college. I kept having flashes of her as a little girl scribbling on scraps of paper.
But somewhere between the sauna, the cold plunge and the endorphins doing whatever the hell they were doing, something else came up too.
Not that I was losing my daughter.
Just that something was over.
Her childhood maybe. Or this particular phase of mothering. The version of my life organized around someone needing me in a very specific way.
She’s her own woman now. That’s the whole point. I know that.
Still, I sat there breathing and crying and then started laughing.
Holy hell, I have to get out of here. I don’t know what’s happening to me.
But I think my body knew before I did.
The morning I left New York to head back to Austin, I woke up early and went to a 12-step meeting. I was sipping a London Fog and talking to the woman next to me. She looked to be in her thirties.
“My daughter just graduated college,” I said. “It feels weird. Like mothering is officially over.”
She laughed.
“I promise you I’m not just saying this because you need to hear it, but I’m the youngest of five and my mom tells us all the time: I mother more now that you’re all gone than I did when you lived with me.”
