Loading blog content, please wait...
By OK Tease Co.
The Suitcase by the Door and the Quiet After They Drive Off The little suitcase is packed and standing by the door, the one with the wheels that stick. ...
The little suitcase is packed and standing by the door, the one with the wheels that stick. You did the sunscreen, the favorite stuffed animal, the reminder about brushing teeth. Then the car pulls out of the driveway and the sound fades and the house goes still in a way it never does when they are home. You stand in the kitchen. And it hits you all at once how loud quiet can be.
If you have lived this, you know it does not need explaining. The counter still has crumbs on it. There is a cup in the sink that was half full an hour ago. Everything looks the same and nothing feels the same, because the two people who fill the whole house with noise and mess and questions are gone, and the space they left behind is bigger than they are.
This is one of the hardest moments there is. Not the dramatic kind that people gather around. The quiet kind that nobody sees.
Nobody warns you about the goodbye at the door. They warn you about the big stuff, the money, the logistics, the schedule that you keep on your phone and in your head at the same time. But the goodbye is its own thing. You spend so much of your days needed. Someone always wants a snack, a ride, a referee, a lap to climb into. You carry all of it without stopping because stopping is not an option.
And then, for a stretch of hours, nobody needs you.
You would think that would feel like relief. Sometimes it does, for about four minutes. Then it turns into something heavier, because being needed is also how you know who you are right now. Take it away for a night or a weekend and you are standing in a quiet kitchen wondering what you are supposed to do with your own two hands.
That feeling is not a flaw in you. It is what happens to a woman who pours herself out every single day and suddenly has no one in front of her to pour into. Women do not get to step back. We keep going, as moms, as daughters, as sisters. The breaks do not come, so when one is forced on us it feels less like rest and more like a room that echoes.
Here is where I will be honest with you, the way a friend who has stood in that same kitchen would be. The first hour is the one that decides the tone of the whole stretch. Not because you have to be productive. Because what you reach for first tends to set the pace.
I am not going to tell you to feel grateful or to make the most of your free time. That is the tidy version, and the tidy version skips right past how much it stings. Sit in it for a minute if you need to. You are allowed. But do not build a whole weekend inside that minute.
The thing that has moved me out of that quiet more than anything is my body. Not because of how it looks. Because moving is a stress reliever before it is anything else, and it is the fastest door I know into feeling like myself again. A walk. Twenty minutes of something that gets your heart going. The point is not the workout. The point is that motion breaks the stillness, and once your body starts moving your head follows almost right behind it. You only get the one body, and it turns out it is also the lever that gets your mind unstuck when nothing else will. The CDC's guidance on the mental benefits of physical activity says out loud what most of us feel the second we get moving: it lifts something you cannot lift any other way.
Here is the part I want you to actually hear. The quiet house is not only a hole where they used to be. It is also space. And you get to decide what fills it.
This is the stretch where you get to find out who you are when you are not being someone's whole world for a few hours. That woman still exists. She got buried under lunchboxes and permission slips and the ten thousand small things you carry, but she did not go anywhere. The empty house, as much as it aches, is one of the only places you get to go looking for her.
Some nights that looks like moving your body. Some nights it looks like doing one thing that is just yours, that nobody else touches. Some nights it is putting on the shirt that says something true across the front and feeling your shoulders go back a little when you catch yourself in the mirror. That is the whole idea behind what we put on those tees. Not fashion. A reminder you can wear, so that on the day you do not feel strong, the thing on your chest says it for you until you believe it again.
And here is the full circle of it, the part that makes the hard stretch mean something. Your kids come back. They walk in the door with their sticky hands and their stories, and over months and years they watch you. They see you go into the depths of a quiet house and come out of it standing. They do not need a speech about strength. They are witnesses to yours. Every time you rise out of that stillness instead of staying down in it, you are showing them what a woman does with hard things. That is the inheritance. Not a tidy life. A mother they watched come back up, over and over.
I believe God knew what He was doing when He made the woman. I also believe He asks us to trust the process when it makes no sense at all, when it feels flat unfair, when the house is too quiet and you cannot see the reason for any of it yet. I do not have the tidy version of that faith where everything lines up. I have the other one. The one where you cannot see the point and you keep going anyway.
Life will turn around for you the minute you start turning it around for yourself. Not in a way that erases the goodbye at the door. In a way that means the quiet stops running the house. You do.
You are stronger than that stillness. You always were. Some nights you just have to move your feet a little to remember it.
You've got this. Keep going.