Thoughts and Actions After Leaving Your Heart at LAX

1. Thought: Does my life have a purpose outside of the beautiful boys and girl that I've brought into the world, the children who order my days and nights?
2. Thought: What will I do if a missile hits their plane, and it goes down? Will I become a vengeful, crazy woman intent on destruction? Will I be a domestic jihadist, maybe even a conservative? I know this sounds insane, but I'm nothing if not honest. Notice that the above photo is a selfie when the boys landed in Atlanta, so you can disregard any thought of your yellow dog becoming a member of the armed forces. You can tell they were thrilled when I placed my order via text.
3. Action: Try the new bakery on the way home and around the corner from the empty house. Order an incredible croissant with roasted tomato, bacon and Gruyere and some coffee for there and a Paris-Brest to take home. Sit down at a long table and pour coffee into beautiful mug from a silver carafe. Drink coffee, eat croissant, page through an actual copy of The New York Times, which feels good in the hands but is so filled with horror that you must push it aside. Gaze at the to-go box with Paris-Brest inside. 
   
4. Action: Decide that it can't wait and eat Paris-Brest -- all of it.
5. Thought: Know that some friends would call this taking care of yourself and others' emotional eating. As you lick the insides of the box, where the hazelnut cream is smeared, think I don't give a damn about anything in this moment.
6. Action: Get home and wander aimlessly about the quiet house, waiting for Sophie to get home from a bike ride with her father. Straighten up boys' room, make beds lovingly, still mournful of their inhabitants' absence. Notice, suddenly, that elder son's clear retainer is lying in the folds of the navy bean-bag chair. 
7. Thought: I wonder if he's been wearing this thing at all over the last month or so? What the hell? Where is the case? Those $5,000 teeth are probably getting crooked as we speak. Decide to have a few words with the kid as soon as he lands.
8. Action: Work for a couple of hours on the project that my friend M gave me. I am so grateful for this work, and it's something so worthy that the work is a pleasure.
9. Action: Make barbecue chicken for a friend in the hospital using the broiler in my 1928 oven for the first time. 
10. Thought: Who knew the broiler worked and was so great? I've raised three children and never made barbecue chicken with the broiler. What the hey?
11. Thought: Are we as a culture evolving into persons who will all have breast cancer and autism? It seems that way as five people I know have recently been diagnosed, and I know countless children with autism.
12. Thought: I don't make a big deal about the womanly cycles, menstruation, or The Change, but really -- I'm nearly 51, and there don't seem to be signs of it, and I definitely don't need to have any more children, and -- let's face it -- buying feminine hygiene products for 38 years is a drag.
13. Action: Take Sophie for a long walk to fend off the blues which are associated, I guess, with the two boys being gone and #12 above.
14. Action: Send the elder son a text about the left-behind retainers that were found in the folds of the bean-bag chair.

Reader, tell me what sort of thoughts and actions you're having and doing today.

Unaccompanied minors

Here are my boys, just before they boarded a flight to Atlanta to visit my parents. Henry was fake-glaring, and Oliver was fake-smiling.

Here we are just before they walked away from me and down that ramp and into the plane. It might not be evident, but just about then I started to feel super queasy. Before I leave my children, and whenever they leave me, I hug and kiss them, then tap them on their hearts and tell them I am in your heart, always, and you're in mine.

I know. Tears are welling up in my eyes, again.

You can't see them, but those pilots must have felt my eyes boring into them. 

They waved, and I waved back and pointed to my heart and then back to them.