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Anna Quindlen
Flown Away, Left Behind

I was something of an accidental mother. I don’t mean that in the old traditional whoops! way; it’s just that while I barreled through my twenties convinced that having a baby would be like carrying a really large and inconvenient tote bag that I could never put down, I awoke one day at thirty and, in what now seems an astonishingly glib leap of faith, decided I wanted that tote bag in the very worst way. It was as though my ovaries had taken possession of my brain. Less than a year later, an infant had taken possession of everything else. My brain no longer worked terribly well, especially when I added to that baby another less than two years later, and a third fairly soon after that.

That was twenty years ago. You do the math. The first one went to China to polish his Mandarin. The second left for college in the fall. I still have a chick in the nest, and what a chick she is, but increasingly it feels like an aerie too large for its occupants. Recently I told her we were going to be doing something we had always done as a family. “We don’t have that family anymore,” she said. (Here I pause to remove the shiv from between my ribs, breathe deeply, and smile.) …

Excerpted from I Wanna Be Sedated: 30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers
Copyright 2004 by Anna Quindlen