Deja Vu All Over Again

Same old same old. Well, I'm the same, but older, and the kids are different, but the same.

Seven years after my oldest child was a college freshman, I again find myself visiting campus, meeting a new crop of eighteen year olds. Each one reminds me of someone I had met years ago -- the kid everyone on the floor loves, the one everyone loves to hate, the few you just know you'll see in cap and gown less than four years from now and feel as if you've known them forever and wonder why time goes so fast.

As I lay practically comatose on my daughter's dorm bed, my body contorted unnaturally around the various items of her daily life that seem to occupy permanent spots on top of her rumpled comforter, I gave up on trying to hoist myself up to greet the seemingly endless stream of visitors. At one point, alone in the room, I was momentarily embarrassed when a boy pushed the door open without knocking. Unnecessarily, no doubt, I peered up at him and explained I was not one of the girls who lived there. When he introduced himself, I apologized for not getting up to shake his hand. He didn't seem at all offended. I suppose you can't expect social grace when you're the one who didn't knock.

The quad outside the dorm was swarming with baby faced boys (I wasn't fooled by the facial hair) playing volleyball and football or just simply on the move, filled with energy and burgers and hot dogs and clearly unaware of the paunches in their future. Unaware that one day the hair on their backs will be thicker than the hair on their heads. They don't know yet about nose hair clippers; they are light years away from proctology jokes.

I had convinced myself I was down in New Orleans a mere four weeks after school had started because my daughter was homesick. Apparently she thinks I was down in New Orleans because I was, well, "child sick." It's not that she wasn't glad to see me -- I did, after all, come armed with a credit card and a dozen Chicago bagels. Not New York bagels, but still a treat in the culinary wasteland of jambalaya and po boys. She's been away before, for even longer than four weeks, but freshman year in college is different. A more official sort of parting, the kind from which there can be no real return. And, as she pointed out, it had been just the two of us for five years. You get kind of attached.

I've been down this road before. Twice. It's the same but different. Six and seven years ago there were still birds left in my nest. There was always somebody else around and I thought it was good to give the college kids their space, to really let them leave. Not that they ever really did, completely. Six and seven years ago it was Facebook that kept the kids tied to their old friends from home and maybe slower to connect with the new friends down the hall. Now it's instagrams and snap chats and selfies. The phones have gotten smaller and now they're getting bigger again, but there's no stopping the trend toward staying in touch, always being somewhere outside the moment and place you're in. Maybe it's like love though; maybe there's enough connectedness to go around.

After dinner with my daughter and her roommate last night, I headed back to my hotel, sad to leave them but happy to wind down the day, alone. They headed back to the dorm, excited to get ready for a frat party. The night was young, and they would be spending it surrounded by friends they've just met and, at the same time, constantly in touch with friends they've recently left behind. Two girls boarded my street car, and they seemed disappointed that there weren't two seats together. Diagonally across the aisle from each other, both tapped away at their cell phones the entire time. When we pulled up to their stop, though, they took off, still tapping away but giggling together about something. Maybe it is possible to be two places at once.

It's Sunday morning, and it will be hours before I meet my daughter for breakfast. For me, it's the same routine, different Starbucks.  I can barely remember the Starbucks on M Street in D.C., and am already feeling quite at home at the one on Magazine Street. The people are different but the same. Students, young families, twenty-somethings just back from a run. I'm the same but older.

I am looking forward to spending another day with my daughter, but content with my time alone. Well, alone except for the occasional text with folks far away. Same old, same new.

Namaste. Damnit.

As I teetered my way clumsily across a narrow concrete curb the other day, avoiding the relative safety of the broad sidewalk (and risking ridicule), I thought this was how a twelve year old boy must feel (minus the risk of ridicule) on a quiet summer afternoon, skipping stones by a lake. Alone but not lonely, joyful but not overly so. Teetering across a narrow concrete curb -- my version of a happy dance.

There has been a noticeable change in my gait since a relatively new friend set me straight a few weeks ago. "Aha!" We had been practicing amateur psychology on each other for several hours, and were heading back to our cars. I felt like I do when I emerge from an afternoon movie, blinking and confused by the harsh assault of daylight. As we prepared to disappear back into the solitude of our own heads for the rest of the day, our conversation moved to lighter topics -- the indignity of lactose intolerance, the joys of going gluten free -- the innocuous yet inescapable minutiae of life in the third millennium.

And yoga. My on again off again passion, the unlikely discipline that once kept me afloat, then made me feel trapped, and then, only recently, began to buoy me up again. I had confessed to my new friend that I felt a bit intimidated in that morning's class. It felt like extreme yoga, or, I suppose, yoga for extremists. I was surrounded by overachievers: a sinewy specimen to my left wearing paper thin tights that gave the illusion of being full leg tattoos, a fearless fireplug on my right who kept going upside down and toppling onto the wood floor with a reverberating thud. Forty minutes into the class, I was still struggling with the simplest poses, trying to convince myself that an inability to completely straighten my left knee did not make me a bad person. Oh, how I envied the overachievers, how I pined for the good old days of hyper extension.

Aha? I expected a bit more empathy from my new friend, who seemed well versed in the feelings of inferiority that plague us women as we forge deeper into middle age, the era of all sorts of pauses. "I am better than you are at yoga!" I could swear she had told me only moments earlier that she sucked at yoga. My inner goddess was withering; I wanted to punch this woman, wipe the serene smile off her face, reclaim some ground on the superiority scale.

She elaborated. "I suck and I don't care!" I felt ashamed, tempted to turn in my Lululemon professional discount card. She was right, more right than she could have been had she stood on one hand and folded both legs into a perfect lotus behind her ears while she sipped at a cup of green tea. She is better than I am at yoga, if there is such a thing as being better at yoga. All the lessons yoga had taught me, the words I have pretended to live by, that I have passed on to others, they were all coming back to bite me in my flexible ass. What happened to non-competitiveness and non-comparativeness and being present in the moment? My own moment, that is, not somebody else's.

Days have passed since that walk of shame with my friend, and I have tried to be present and non-judgmental and enjoy as many moments as possible without wanting anything more or less. I shrug the small stuff down my back with my shoulders, and I celebrate even the most minor victories.

This morning, in a hot and overstuffed holiday yoga class accommodating the dedicated yogis for what would have been three classes on a normal Monday, I teetered my way into a balancing pose, one that usually requires little effort. I was hesitant, trying not to fall. "Nice, Lisa," I heard the instructor say. She could not possibly have been talking to me, as shaky as I felt, but, then again, maybe she was. I sucked, but I just didn't care.