Sorry I Was Gone: A Poison Ivy Rash, a Gutted Garage, and Dolly Parton

Did you miss me last week? I missed you. Here's where I was: at my in-laws' cabin, elbow deep in a garage that hadn't been touched in years, coming home every night too tired to string a sentence together, let alone write one.

And then, a few days after we got home, while I was sitting on my bathroom counter slathering calamine lotion on a poison ivy rash that had taken over my forearms (souvenir of clearing brush along the shoreline, a decision I regret more every time I scratch), my phone buzzed with the news about Dolly Parton. I looked down, and I just sat there for a minute, itchy and stunned at the same time.

Eighty years old. Gone. And I felt it in a way I didn't expect to.

The Woman Who Told Us It Was Okay to Become Someone New

Here's the thing about Dolly. She didn't just sing songs. She gave about four generations of women permission. Permission to be too much. Permission to leave the holler and build an empire, then come back and put a theme park in it. Permission to look exactly how you want to look, love who you want to love, say what you want to say, and never once apologize for taking up space.

She reinvented herself over and over, out loud, in public, for sixty years. She didn't do it quietly and she didn't do it once and call it finished. She just kept becoming. And somehow she made every single version of herself feel like the truest one yet.

I think that's why the news hit me the way it did. Not just because we lost an icon (we did).

But because she was proof of something I've been circling for a while now: you don't age out of becoming. You just keep going.

A Week at the Cabin, Doing What Used to Be Someone Else's Job

Andy and I just spent a week at his family's cabin, and it wasn't a vacation so much as it was a job. We gutted and reorganized the garage (which used to be the original cabin, back before anyone added on) so it's actually usable again instead of a storage unit nobody dares open. We cleared the shoreline, pulled weeds, and cleaned up the beach so the whole family can actually enjoy the lake without the neighbors giving us the side eye over how it's looked the last few summers (that's where the poison ivy got me, if you're wondering). And inside, we vacuumed, dusted, and did what felt like forty loads of laundry, towels, sheets, you name it. The kind of work my in-laws used to just handle, the way parents do, quietly, without anyone noticing until they couldn't do it anymore.

Somewhere around hour six of hauling junk out of that garage, it hit me. This is the handoff. This is what it looks like when the generation ahead of you starts needing the generation behind them to step up. Nobody sends a memo. You just look up one day and realize the cabin needs you now in a way it never used to.

It's a strange kind of grief, watching your in-laws move from "the ones who take care of things" to "the ones who need things taken care of." Nobody talks about that passage much. We talk about empty nests and midlife crises and menopause (a lot, on this blog, no regrets). We don't talk enough about the quiet moment you realize you've become the load-bearing generation.

Meanwhile, My Baby Is Packing for Her Senior Year

And as if the universe wanted to make sure I got the full multi-course meal of midlife feelings this month, my youngest is headed back to campus for her senior year. Last year. Last first-day-of-school photo I'll ever awkwardly beg for. Last time I'll help her cart a mini fridge up three flights of stairs while pretending I'm not doing the math on how few of these moves are left.

I am, officially, one school year away from being done raising kids in the traditional sense.

Both girls out. Both building lives that are theirs and not mine. And I keep waiting to feel the grief everyone warns you about, and instead what I mostly feel is this weird, buzzy anticipation. Like standing at the top of a staircase I haven't walked down yet.

Can you relate? That mix of "I'm so proud I could cry" and "wait, what do I do with myself now?" It doesn't make you a bad mother. It just makes you a mother whose job description is quietly rewriting itself.

Past, Present, and Whatever Comes Next

So, here's where I landed, itchy arms and all, calamine lotion drying on my skin. Dolly's gone. My in-laws are aging out of the jobs they've done my whole married life. My last kid is one year from launching. And somewhere in the middle of all of it is me, fifty and seasoned, watching every direction at once. The past that shaped me. The present that's asking more of me. The future that's wide open in a way that's honestly a little terrifying.

But Dolly didn't get to be Dolly by staying still and waiting for permission. She wrote "9 to 5" and then built a dozen more careers on top of it. She turned her own hard, poor childhood into a theme park that employs thousands of people. She kept singing well into her seventies and eighties like it never once occurred to her to stop.

I don't think I'm supposed to mourn this stage of my life. I think I'm supposed to notice it. The cabin needs new hands now, and mine are it. My daughter doesn't need me to pack her mini fridge much longer, and that's not a loss, it's a graduation. And me? I've got a whole next chapter sitting right in front of me, waiting on me to pick up the pen.

Dolly would tell me to quit staring at it and start writing. So that's what I'm doing. Coat of many colors and all.

What passage are you standing in the middle of right now? I'd love to hear it. Drop it in the comments, or just tell me over coffee sometime. You know where to find me.