One Last Run

Pilar Guzmán faces an empty nest and marks the end of an era with one more ski trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

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When your youngest kid is a high school senior, life becomes a series of lasts. The last first day of school. The last parent-teacher conference. I know from watching my first son leave the nest that college is a mere prelude to real adulthood. Even the sometimes-long holiday breaks are just a liminal stage when everyone still lives under one roof for a few precious weeks and I can lean into the oxytocin rush of knowing both boys are safely tucked in their beds. The “lasts” are like the irregular menstrual cycles in the run-up to the great pause, the final gasps of a significant chapter of life. At once glacial and fleeting, it’s the chapter that wipes memory of all previous chapters—or any recollection of what one did with an entire Sunday before kids. While our younger son has a full life outside of the family unit, our default setting lands us at home most nights for all the “just in case” scenarios. Just in case he might need a second set of eyes on a history paper. Just in case he might want to watch an episode of Tokyo Vice. Isuspect it’s a holdover from COVID, when, as my husband and I often say half-jokingly, we suddenly both became full-time stay-at-home parents. Add to that the developmental stakes for adolescents during that period—academic, social, and emotional—which made us more vigilant. Our kids reacclimated to a new normal and haven't given us much to worry about of late, but we both still sleep with one eye open, waiting for a reassuring text or Life360 alert. Our younger son is the more social of our two boys, and while he might indulge us with a weekend lasagna-making project, dinner with us is often a pit stop in a packed itinerary that takes him all over town.