1 min read
Bird Launcher
A few months ago, my son graduated from Queen's University. He is 22. I sat there and let it land, and what landed wasn't only pride. It was the recognition that an entire stretch of my life, the part that was his to have, was finished. That has stayed with me ever since. Not what it means for him. What it means for me.
I started withinUs after breast cancer recovery. I was not looking to build a company. I was looking for something to hold onto, a reason to take my own health seriously, something that might help other women do the same. I thought the hardest physical and emotional years were behind me.
They were not.
What I did not know was that perimenopause had already begun. Frozen shoulder, twice. Vertigo. The anxiety. The brain fog. The 3 am club you never asked to join. Nobody tells you what the transition looks like until you are already inside it.
So there I was. Building a company and raising a son. My body and my mind shifting in ways I did not choose.
Every mother knows the pull. Something has to give. You cannot pour yourself into everything equally, no matter how early you get up or how late you stay up.
I searched for the version where I was fully present everywhere at once. It does not exist. Eventually I stopped searching and started making choices.
Some seasons I chose to be a parent first. I worked on my laptop through the night so I could show up. The playground after school. The talent shows. The field trips. Driving his friends home. We did not live near his school, so I found whatever solution I could, even when my husband was away on business, and I was doing it alone.
I learned the difference between being needed and being in the way.
Some seasons I chose the business first. Long hours, hard decisions, real doubt. There were years I did not feel like I belonged in either role, not quite the founder I was trying to be, not quite the mother I had pictured. That doubt does not announce itself. It just sits there and waits.
Most of the time I chose what to give. Sometimes the choice was made for me.
I am not a perfect mother. I have moments I would do differently. He grew up faster in some ways than I would have chosen.
I carry that.
But I showed up. I cared. I gave what I had and kept giving even when it was not much.
This is not a story about doing it right. It is a story about doing it anyway, through a body and a decade that did not cooperate, and ending up somewhere real.
They call this stage the empty nest. I have never liked that phrase.
I am not empty.
I am a bird launcher.
That is a different thing entirely.
Empty looks back at the space. Launcher looks forward at the flight. I raised a person I believe in, and I cannot wait to see what he does with his life. This is not loss. That is the whole point of the job.
And for the first time in a long time, I am asking a question I put down years ago: what do I want now? What does it feel like to tend to myself the way I have spent years encouraging other women to? What does joy look like when I am not the last one I consider?
I do not have all the answers. I am still very much in the middle of it myself. But something shifted the day he graduated. I am in a different phase now.
For the women still in the middle of it, still pouring into everyone and everything, wondering when it will be your turn: the chapter you are in is not the whole story.
You are not failing. You are choosing.
And when the bird launches, the question finally changes.
It is no longer only what they need.
It is finally what you need too.
Tami
