Where's My Holiday Tennis Spirit???

 As I was sitting at my tennis Christmas party yesterday my mind kept wandering to my son.  My beautiful son is going away to college this next year.  It is not sitting well with me.  I should be doing more.  Less tennis, maybe contribute financially to what this next year is going to bring us.  I still have my littlest at home, no time for a job, the guilt that plagues me that the burden solely lies on the amazing husband who has given us this extraordinary life. This family has been, and still is my job, for the past 20 years.  I do not want it to change.  The internal fight that my mind and body are struggling with is taking over my every thought.  It's not empty nest cause my nest is not empty yet.  Pre-Empty Nest Anxiety Disorder.  I'm suffering from a disorder that does not exactly exist for me yet.  The same way when I was pregnant for 2 days in 1995,  I was never pregnant, but I cried and morned that baby I never had.  My mother-n-law still laughs at me over that.  I worry about things.  I worry about this boy/man that I have raised. But I know he's got this, we've done a really, really good job.  He is an extraordinary kid with cool quirks that make him tick to his own beat.  He's an amazing tennis player, that never fell in love with it.  Maybe he will someday. 



I've watched some tennis friends go through this empty nest syndrome.  What do they do?  Seems like they play more tennis.  Why am I feeling like the opposite could be true?  Find that happy tennis place, my new tennis place?  Tennis used to be an exit from the hum drum of every day life of a house wife and mom.  Exercise, friends, getting out of the house.   Now what is it?  What's it going to be for me as I grow old?  Right now I just want to be locked away inside my house, huddled close with those babies and my love.  I do not want to go out, I don't want to be with anyone else.  Just here, just home, no more parties, no more tennis, no more chardonnay.  Just me and my peeps together for our last unchanged holiday months.  Where they are still my babies in my nest with me protecting them, where nothing else in the world matters.... Like the first month of his life when I stayed in my pjs all day, feeding him taking naps.   That life was wonderful and simple.  

Ahhh yet, another client dinner tonight and a happy face I will put on as I order that chardonnay.