The After Party

As I staggered into the kitchen this morning at five, I couldn't for the life of me remember the party I must have thrown the night before. Dirty wine glasses everywhere, three empty bottles, and half eaten bags of every kind of potato chip known to man strewn everywhere. It had the markings of a fun evening (I love salt and vinegar chips); I wished I could summon a memory or two.

Then I noticed my daughter's coat "hung up" across the kitchen table, and, well, mystery solved. There are lots of parties to which I am not invited, but you know you're pathetic when you're excluded from one in your very own house. Okay, I'm exaggerating. I wasn't excluded by anyone other than myself. I chose to hide in my bedroom, texting and chatting with my adult friends on my cell so I could take comfort in knowing that they, too, seemed to be observing rather than participating in life these days.

For a while I sat in the kitchen with the twenty-somethings, hugging the old familiars as they arrived, engaging in fond reminiscences. I was mesmerized by their chatter, and couldn't help trying to figure out when I blinked and missed this transition from childhood to adulthood. Facing the real world after four years of college can be scary, but they all seemed so self assured, their individual anxieties obliterated by the swaddling comfort of old high school friends. They invited me (more than half-jokingly, I assume) to join them for a drink at the local watering hole. That's when I took off in a panic for bed.

This morning, I slipped effortlessly into my role as one-woman cleaning crew. I took my daughter's coat, along with those of her two siblings, from their spots on the table and over the backs of chairs and hung them up in the closet, where the kids will never think to look for them. Always a source of amusement for me -- listening to them run around frantically searching for the jackets they had so carefully stowed wherever they happened to land.

I washed the wine glasses and put the empty bottles in the recycling bin, ran the dishwasher, and enlisted the help of the dogs in cleaning all the crumbs up on the floor. In a few weeks, I will be waking yet again to an uncluttered kitchen that looks just the way I left it before I went to bed. And frankly, I'll be a little sad.