After an intense year in 2023, I was looking for ways to calm my mind and rest my body. Over the holidays, Ron suggested playing cards and asked if I wanted to learn how to play Gin Rummy. I said I did, and I am so glad. I love it so much. Gin Rummy has that perfect combination of luck and skill that make a game fun for me.

If a game is all skill, I’ll never win around here. Ron and Ronan (our son) are both incredibly competitive, like family game nights are not very possible kind of competitive, so if there is a skill to be learned and some kind of “win” at the end, both of them will master said skill and then make it so no one (and by no one, I mean me but probably any other human as well) will want to play with them.

Thankfully, I can win sometimes at Gin Rummy. I have pretty good luck, and I’ll take it.

Every morning and often at night for the past month, I find Ron, especially after morning chores, and hold up the cards as if to ask if he’ll play again, and he almost always obliges. It has been especially fun some evenings to allow our son to play online with his friends while Ron and I sit by the fire, play cards, and listen to classical music. The best is when we listen to videos of our son playing cello.

The other night it hit me pretty hard. Soon, our boy is going to be gone, and our lives are going to be so different. Our son’s plan is to attend a conservatory for cello, and I do believe that’s likely to happen for him. I have wondered: What will I do with myself when I am not being a full-time mom? I have been a full-time mom for nearly 27 years. What do I do next?

It will be just me and Ron and our cards and the fire and videos of our boy on his cello. When this hit me, I started to cry thinking about the youngest leaving the nest, but then Ron said something funny, and I remembered how very much I love this man, this amazing human I get to know, and I realized I’m going to be okay. We’re going to be okay.

I’ve often worried about our son taking the music with him when he goes, but we will have recordings that I will treasure for the whole of my life, and I’m sure he’ll just keep making more. In the meantime, I’m thinking some about what I want to do with the rest of my life when I am not a full-time mom anymore.

I don’t know what I’ll do, but it definitely involves Ron, cards, music, farm animals, and, hopefully, calm.

And, hopefully, I’ll keep my good luck.

photo credit: Laine Cooper, Unsplash