The Room Is Familiar

Something miraculous has happened recently.

Both of my boys are now in full-day school.

At 7:30, they leave for school and the house becomes quiet.

I make tea.

And then I have the morning.

I haven’t had mornings like this in seven years.

Before having kids, the first hour or two of my day was almost always spent in bed. I would read. I would write. Mostly I would think.

I never considered it a practice. I wasn’t trying to have a morning routine. There was no particular purpose to it.

It was just how my days began.

I would wake up and there was this stretch of time before I had to become whoever I needed to be that day.

Then I had children.

And without really noticing it, mornings disappeared.

Not literally, of course. There were seven years’ worth of mornings. Thousands of them.

They just belonged to something else.

There were little people in the house who woke up and needed things. They wanted breakfast. They wanted to climb into bed. They wanted to tell me something. There were clothes and shoes and questions and places we eventually needed to be.

I don’t mean any of this as a complaint.

I loved a lot of those mornings.

I still love those mornings.

But they weren’t mine in the same way.

And now, suddenly, they are again.

What has surprised me most is how familiar they feel.

Seven years is a long time.

I am not the same person I was before my boys were born. Almost nothing about my life is the same.

But I sit down with my tea in a quiet house and there is this immediate recognition.

Oh, I remember this.

It’s almost as though a former shape of my life has simply reappeared.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed it.

There is something strange about getting an old part of your life back only because another part of your life has moved on.

I love having these mornings again.

And the reason I have them is that my boys don’t need their mornings to happen around me in quite the same way anymore.

They’re growing up.

I think parenting must contain a lot of these exchanges.

You get something back at exactly the moment you realize you will never get something else back.

That sounds sadder than it feels.

Mostly, it doesn’t feel sad.

I am happy to see them growing up. I like watching them become more independent. I like the people they are becoming.

And I really, really like my mornings.

Both things are true.

Maybe that’s what feels so strange about it.

Nothing was taken from me and nothing was given back.

Life just changed shape again.

Recently I’ve been thinking about Verse 11 of the Tao Te Ching.

It talks about three ordinary things: a wheel, a vessel, and a room.

The spokes make the wheel, but the empty center allows it to turn. Clay makes the vessel, but the empty part allows it to hold something. Walls create a room, but it is the space inside that we actually inhabit.

I’ve always liked that verse.

I think I used to understand it mostly as an argument for emptiness.

Leave some space.

Don’t fill everything.

But these mornings have made me see something else in it.

The emptiness isn’t separate from the form.

The room exists because of the walls around it.

Move the walls and you change the room.

That’s what seems to have happened in my life.

For seven years, the shape of my life didn’t have this particular room in it.

There were other rooms, of course. Some of them only existed because I had become a father.

But this one was gone.

Then the walls moved.

My boys got older.

They started full-day school.

And suddenly the room was there again.

I didn’t clear it.

I didn’t reclaim it.

I didn’t decide I needed more time for myself.

Life made the space.

Or maybe more accurately, life changed shape, and the space appeared.

But of course it isn’t really the old room.

Because I’m not the person who left it.

That’s the part I keep thinking about.

The room is familiar.

But I’m not.

The person who used to lie in bed reading and writing in the morning hadn’t raised two children for seven years.

And yet when I sit down in the morning, something feels immediately recognizable.

I’m not trying to recreate the mornings I had before my children were born.

I don’t think I could.

I’m meeting them again.

That feels different.

It reminds me of returning to a book I loved years ago.

The words haven’t changed.

But somehow the book has.

A sentence that meant nothing to me before suddenly stops me.

Something I underlined years ago doesn’t seem particularly interesting anymore.

Of course the book hasn’t changed at all.

I have.

Maybe returning to anything after a long absence is a way of discovering what time has done to us.

I think that’s part of what I love about these mornings.

They’re familiar enough that I recognize myself in them, but different enough that I can notice the distance I’ve traveled.

The boys leave at 7:30.

The house gets quiet.

I make tea.

Sometimes I read.

Sometimes I write.

Mostly I think.

I don’t know what these mornings will become. I don’t particularly need them to become anything.

For now, I am enjoying the strange experience of walking back into a room I remember very well.

Everything looks familiar.

The light comes in.

There is somewhere to sit.

My tea is beside me.

I know this room.

I’m just getting to know the person sitting in it.