At least Fluff still lives at home. And a picnic below.

I still miss my Aral tons. I really think we were meant to live as family units all our lives. This nuclear family bs is just that, bs!

Anyway, I sort of had a meltdown, crying all the way here from Buffalo, and this morning was no cake and ice cream walk either.

They say love is what a mother feels for her newborn, I mean the emotion of love is based totally on what a mother feels when she sees her newborn. Romantic love is just that feeling transferred to your romantic partner. So of course, when a mother is separated from her child, she is going to experience heartbreak, elementary my dear Watson. The first time I felt that awful, sickening heartbreak was when Aral went to college. I didn’t get out of bed for a week, could not stop crying for the Kohinoor diamond, and just felt, in the pit of my stomach, that nothing was ever going to be right again. Not ever. And I know other moms who felt the same way as me. Just today, at a picnic, a friend who is a mom said she is planning on buying three lots of land adjacent to each other, to build three houses, one for herself and her husband, one for her son, and one for her daughter, so they cal always live close to one another and never be separated. Yesterday, on the plane, the woman seated next to me and I were talking, and she said that when her first son went to college, she basically went to bed for four days and couldn’t even talk to her son for weeks because her emotions were so raw, that she was afraid she was going to upset him. Another friend used the exact same phrase as I did, “Nothing will ever be ok again” when her daughter went off to college.

This is what we women have to go through. Maybe mine is a little more extreme because I have a mood disorder, but not much more extreme. Or more likely, at this extremely stressful time, all moms “develop” mood disorders, temporarily. These are extremely powerful emotions, maybe the most powerful emotion in the world, the love of a mother for her child. It is a survival of the species thing, if mothers didn’t love and adore their children, they would not take care of them, if they didn’t take care of them, the babies would not survive, and if the babies didn’t survive, the human race would die out. Therefore, this love a mother feels for her child has to be so powerful that it leads to the survival of the human species. And when that bond is broken, then the strength of the pain is proportional to the strength of the powerful love. And so we have empty nest syndrome. Awful, awful, awful, heartbreaking, most horrible feeling in the world. I sort of go through that every time I leave Aral in Buffalo after my visit. If love is a drug, and as I have hypothesized, maternal love is the most powerful of loves, then we mothers experience the most powerful of withdrawal symptoms when our babies leave the nest. Aaaah! So not fair. And so awful.

Well anyway, I am getting over my Aral withdrawals, and becoming a person again instead of a human water (tear) producing system.

I have to learn my lines! My play practice is in a day, and I have to learn my lines. I’m taking today off for empty nest, and tomorrow, back to business and learning lines.