I am sitting at the bar of a restaurant in Columbia, South Carolina. Brainy Bird will spend the entire summer home with me, and tonight is his last chance to go out with his friends before he heads back to Houston for the summer. I insisted that he go out with his friends. He hesitated, and then he decided to go with his friends. Honestly, I wanted some quiet time for myself.
The past few months have been extraordinarily busy at work, busy in a good way. My brain has not had much time to process anything other than everything that I have going on at work. It feels amazing to sit down for a moment and collect my thoughts.
I arrived in Columbia at around 1:30 AM this morning. My travel plans had me arriving a tad earlier than that, but it took a “beauty queen’s be ready in a minute” to get through the airport. The Charlotte airport runs a skeleton crews at the Charlotte airport later in the night, so deplaning and getting my luggage took longer than usual. The drive from the Charlotte airport to Columbia takes about ninety minutes, and I made good time, recovering some of the time lost at the airport.
As I said, I arrived in Columbia at around 1:30 AM this morning. That is when the real delay of my trip ensued. Something went wrong with my hotel’s computer system, and none of the keys were working. They even tried to use their master key to put me into my room with a plan of later slipping my keys under the door while I slept, once their system came back online. No luck, the master key did not even work. After about ninety minutes, the system seemed to come back online, and I was able to get a working room key and crash out in my room.
I felt generous and set my alarm for 8 AM. One advantage of being South Carolina is that I am an hour ahead of the headquarters of the consulting firm that I work for, and two to three hours ahead of my clients. Even getting up at 8 AM this morning took some effort. I slept so well. The idea of getting up seemed like too much work. While my first meeting was not until 10 AM, I had a significant amount of work to do before my meetings started, so sleep deprived me got out of bed.
I jumped right into my workday. It was late morning before I connected with Brainy Bird, my whole reason for being in South Carolina. We decided on a 2 PM lunch, based on a break in my work schedule. As I walked out of my hotel room to pick Brainy Bird up for lunch, I looked in the mirror, and I saw a tired, aging woman. I have aged so much in the past couple of years. I also saw a woman that is extremely happy with her life and much less concerned with her appearance than she was a couple of years ago. I took a moment to brush my unwashed hair, and I headed to what would be Brainy Bird’s dorm for just a couple more hours.
As I turned on the street of his dorm, my rented minivan crept up the hill, and my heart flooded with the surreal realization that Brainy Bird’s freshman year of college is already over. It feels like yesterday, that we nervously crept up that same hill to the University of South Carolina’s Honor’s dorm to move him in to begin the next chapter of his life.
I am the mother, the beyond proud, happy mother of a child that is technically now a senior in college, after just one year of college. He will spend all four years in undergraduate school with his double majors (computer science and mathematics) and additional honors course work, but technically he is now a senior. He will be interning this summer on a commodity trading floor in Houston.
He left home just nine months ago, a nervous, but excited child, and he came home a confident, ambitious man. Everyone tells you how much your child will grow emotionally that first year away from home, still one has to see it to fully appreciate it.
I cannot wait to have him home for the summer. He will have one-week next week before he starts his internship. I will be traveling, out of the country, so he will be playing dad for Little Chirp. Little Chirp already has all of their meals planned.
The only person more excited about Brainy Bird’s homecoming than Mom, is the little brother. That is the “little” brother that is now 5’11” and beginning his freshman year of high school. The “little” brother that somehow found a way to have an even more advanced high school freshman schedule than his big brother.
I cannot comprehend how quickly this first year of college flew by. Just as hard to believe is the fact that Little Chirp is headed to high school in the fall.
The birds are soaring from the nest. I am sitting here with an immensely happy heart yet trying not to cry in public.
Tomorrow will be another day of waking up before my body wants to, but Brainy Bird and I are New Orleans bound, and I can hardly wait to spend the evening with my son and my dear cousin. We should call her Brainy Cousin.