Nat made his nightly call tonight and he sounded so small, so quiet.\u00a0 I felt that familiar pang immediately, of wanting to go to The House and look at him and get a sense of him.\u00a0 Of course I could have, if I wanted to.\u00a0 But I also didn’t want to.\u00a0 I am tired, I need to be here.\u00a0 And nothing is wrong with him or The House, I know that.\u00a0 It is just a pang, or a ping, a question.\u00a0 Is he okay, the words whisper and blow coldly across my heart.\u00a0 I know he is.\u00a0 But I just can’t let go.<\/p>\n
Letting go is one of my most difficult, biggest struggles.\u00a0 I know how to do it, how it actually feels to let something go.\u00a0\u00a0 I have certainly let many things go in my life, or I’d be miserable, or insane.\u00a0 But I have so much trouble with it.\u00a0 I can’t visualize how it feels to drop someone from your everyday consciousness, even one or two relationships that are clearly not good for me.<\/p>\n
But I don’t mean Nat.\u00a0 I’m certainly not trying to do that with Nat.\u00a0 Others tell me I have to let him go, because he’s grown up.\u00a0 The problem is, I don’t believe that he is grown up enough.\u00a0 Stop telling me I have to do that, just because he’s 21.\u00a0 And stop telling me I am treating him like a little boy.\u00a0 He’s not.\u00a0 I have the utmost respect for him.\u00a0 He is not a baby even though his words and expressions are sometimes so innocent and youthful.\u00a0 No, it is none of those things.\u00a0 He and I are just not there yet and that is going to have to be okay.<\/p>\n
I don’t have to let him go yet.\u00a0 We have time before that.\u00a0 I should be letting him go when I’m older and closer to not being able to care for him.\u00a0 I don’t mean last possible minute; I just mean that it doesn’t have to be now.\u00a0 I have to believe that when the time is really right, it will be easier for me.\u00a0 Just like letting him move into The Residence:\u00a0 it was doable; not easy, but doable when he was 18, far more than it would have been when he was 11, when we first considered having him live away from home.\u00a0 Back then, because of Resperadal, we had the choice at last, we had a calm island we could all get to, and so we were given time to work things out with Nat so that he was okay again.\u00a0 I consider Resperadal a gift to our family, a gift to Nat.\u00a0 That drug allowed us to hold onto him until he and we were ready for that big change.\u00a0 And lately, he has not needed it quite so much, so we have been decreasing his dosage.\u00a0 That he can handle that is another miracle, another gift.<\/p>\n
When I hear his wistful voice these days I wonder how I can reach him, if he doesn’t live here most of the time.\u00a0 I am not wondering how I can stop wondering.\u00a0 I am not looking to let all that go.\u00a0 I have done a lot of that stretching, and so has he, but now, enough.\u00a0 I need to feel close to him again.\u00a0 I need to hear the fullness of his voice and then I know I have done my job.\u00a0 For today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nat made his nightly call tonight and he sounded so small, so quiet.\u00a0 I felt that familiar pang immediately, of wanting to go to The House and look at him and get a sense of him.\u00a0 Of course I could have, if I wanted to.\u00a0 But I also didn’t want to.\u00a0 I am tired, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-w7","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1991"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1993,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1991\/revisions\/1993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}