String of Pearls

A personal essay by Ann Klotz about coming to terms with what it means for a youngest child to leave home

Parents of high school seniors see the young person who lives at home and see, too, all the other versions of that child: infant, wobbly toddler, tentative third grader—our son, Atticus, went through a neon phase that year—lime green shorts paired with a lime green top—awkward middle schooler with orthodontia and a bad haircut. In high school, our boy came into himself, getting his license, getting a job at the ice cream store. He was good company: cuddler, partner-in-crime, fashion consultant.  And then, he was a high school senior: yearbook photos, college apps—our youngest finally ascending to the highest rung on the ladder alone at home with his very senior—he might say elderly—parents. 

I blinked and he grew up.  Graduation was followed by a strange limbo summer. Savoring our time together, I resisted the idea that it was ending.  I was irritated with myself for feeling so sentimental. I’d already sent two daughters–Atticus’ much older sisters–off to college. What was wrong with me? Perhaps I always feared what it would be like to have a son grow up and leave. Long ago, my brother died the summer after his high school graduation. I knew not all patterns repeat themselves—but my mother had had an older brother, too, killed at the end of WWII. 

Conscious of these prior losses, I felt wary, watchful. A few weeks before Atticus left for college, I lost my pearls. My strand of pearls lives either on my neck or in a tiny drawer on top of my dressing table. I rarely travel with them because I don’t want to lose them, but in mid-August, when I returned from being away for a few weeks, I opened the little drawer, reached for them, and they were not there. Perhaps I’d left them at our summer house? My husband, still in Pennsylvania, searched my bureau. 

“Nope,” he said. “They’re not here.”

Atticus tried to console me. “They’ll turn up, Mom.”

Would they?  I felt like a tumbleweed, being blown through circumstances not of my choosing, untethered. My son leaving, my pearls missing.

My pearls had been a gift from my grandmother on my 18^th birthday. She had died a few months earlier, but on my birthday morning, my mom brought a long flat velvet box into my bedroom and said, “These are for you.” There, on a tiny card in a yellowed envelope, written in my grandmother’s loopy cursive was the inscription “For Ann, on her 18^th birthday.” How could I have mislaid something so precious to me? I cherished them, treasured them, never didn’t know where I had put them. Suddenly, I felt off-kilter, anxious.

Photo by Tiffany Anthony on Unsplash

Atticus had been born just as I started a new job leading an all-girls’ school in a new state. He arrived to join his sisters–almost ten and twelve years older than he–and we moved to Ohio to start our new chapter together. In his infancy, he slept in my office in a wicker bassinet that had been my mother’s in the 1920’s. As a little boy, he was puzzled as to why everyone knew him by name, but by the time he graduated last spring, he knew more about my school—the physical plant, our athletics program, and the student vibe—than anyone. Upper School girls often texted him, asking, “Will your mom call a snow day?” or “Can you let me in; I left my laptop at school?”  Obliging, he would urge me to close school and willingly run across the parking lot to help someone who had forgotten an item. 

His oldest sister had left for college when he was seven, and two years later, his other sister left for college in Maine.  

“At least I have him for another decade,” I’d comforted myself back then. Now, I tried to focus on meetings and our progress with the school’s strategic plan, but in the back of my mind, I was counting. Each day, Atticus’ departure loomed closer, and my identity as an everyday mother trembled. Each day, my pearls stayed lost. 

Losing possessions or people did not come easily to me. Though I was proud of my son’s achievements and recognized that leaving home was the natural order, some selfish part of me wanted to stop the clock, keep him with me. And I wanted my pearls back.

Grannie gave all five of her granddaughters a string of pearls. Ever practical, she had purchased them at the same time and written the cards. The jeweled clasp on each strand is different; mine has tiny diamonds and sapphires in filigree; my sister’s clasp has rubies. Twice the necklace has broken—once courtesy of Atticus’ zealous tug when he was a toddler—and I have taken them to an elderly lady, who re-knotted them; each pearl tied separately into the strand.  

My mother told me that pearls grow more lustrous the more you wear them. I didn’t wear mine a lot before I became a headmistress; they felt like old lady jewelry. But as I grew more accustomed to leading a school, I began to consider them a charm, a form of armor.  I wore them when I needed courage, when I needed to feel elegant, powerful, in charge, like my formidable grandmother, Myra, who was also a schoolteacher. Without them, I felt vulnerable. Distracted, I woke in the middle of the night to prowl the house, wondering if I had taken them off absent-mindedly and laid them down. How could I have been so careless?  There was no replacing them, I knew that. They weren’t just beautiful pearls—they were my history, my lineage, my connection to a grandmother and mother.  

On the anniversary of my own brother’s death in early August, Atticus phoned me from the summer house in Pennsylvania. He had planned to drive home that day.  

“Mom, I think I’ll wait till tomorrow to come home. Okay?” 

“Sounds good,” I said.

He knew that I worry about people I love driving long distances—brothers, sons… He arrived home safely the next day, and I remembered how lucky I was to have a boy who was simply going to college—only a text or a Facetime away.

During the pandemic, like his sisters, Atticus worried that his father and I were so old that we might expire at any second, but we remained healthy until Atticus, himself, brought Covid home from a volleyball tournament in Las Vegas the summer after his Junior year. We’d had a crummy week of it, my son and I. He was an excellent nurse, ordering me to nap even as he, too, gave in to his symptoms. He rallied before I did, trudging into my room to urge me to force fluids, hanging a quilt over a window in my room to dim the light so I could sleep. We celebrated his 18th birthday, both still testing positive, feeling wretched but obliged. My assistant dropped off the cake I had ordered before we got sick. We crept downstairs, zoomed with his older sisters—his dad had Covid, too, in Pennsylvania, and slept through the celebration.

Atticus blew out one candle. We cut the cake, and each took a bite. 

“Horrible,” I said, my tastebuds turning everything to cardboard.

“The worst,” he agreed.

“Some birthday,” I smiled, wondering when we could start crawling back upstairs.  “Open your present, son,” I instructed.

I handed him a black velvet box in which nestled a strand of pearls. I’d given pearls to his sisters, too, when they turned eighteen, but he was the only child who had asked for them. A boy ready to wear pearls proudly.  

“Oh, Mom,” he breathed, running them through his fingers. “They’re beautiful. Thank you.”

“They’re real,” I added. “Take care of them.”

“I will. Let’s go, Mom. We’re both tired,” and up we went, back to bed for a few more days.

We felt rotten, but I cherish that strange time, knowing how lucky I was to have a companion who cracked me up, who offered comfort, and loved his gift.

A little over a year later, as I fretted about the missing pearls, it occurred to me that loss and grief are tangled up for me–things and people.

“You don’t lose things you love,” I scolded myself as we started packing.

“But I do,” I muttered, looking at my son, absorbed in a screen, his hair falling across his eyes.  I do lose things I love.” Pearls. My parents and grandparents. My brother. My son.  

I paired socks and sorted t-shirts into piles, folded fleeces, made lists of items to acquire, imagining these preparations could act as a sort of protective charm.  

I pretended Atticus was just going on a trip. But I kept noting the lasts: the last time we’d watch Schitt’s Creek together, the start of the last week he’d be asleep in his bed when I woke him. Driving home from getting ice cream one night, Atticus played me his Sad Girl Goes to College playlist, starting with Taylor Swift’s “Don’t ever grow up” and I began to cry.  

“Mom,” he soothed, “You’re going to be okay.” 

In the deep purple night, the taste of sea salt caramel and hot fudge ice cream mingled with tears, which had arrived without warning. 

“I know,” I bleated, embarrassed by my meltdown.

I continued the search for the pearls, pulling open drawers I’d already checked twice, rummaging in my array of tiny jewelry boxes, knowing I would not find them. I grieved. They were only things, I reminded myself, but my self-talk did not soothe me. I dreamt about them, fumed at my stupidity. How could I have lost an item so imbued with meaning? I was stuck, unable to move beyond how out of balance I felt. 

I worried about how empty the house would feel, how much I would miss Atticus. I dreaded walking into his bedroom after he left, knowing he would not be there.

A therapist friend told me that it’s common to misplace beloved items when a child leaves home.

“Are you kidding?” I asked, incredulous. 

I wondered if giving up the pearls was a kind of tribute. Lose what you love to keep who you love.  

And then, car loaded so full that we could not see out the rear window—suitcases and bedding and a desk lamp and plastic bins—we set off for college, stopping at our summer house overnight to break the journey. Though it was only the third week of August, I needed my sweatshirt. My husband and son foraged in the kitchen for something for supper. I slipped upstairs to my bedroom and turned on the light on my dresser. Tamping down hope, I pulled open the drawer where I stash my jewelry each summer, and nestled in an orange mesh bag, the pearls twinkled. I snatched them up, triumphant. 

I tucked them into the pocket of my jeans, ran down the stairs, grinning.

As we waited for the pasta water to boil, Atticus and I went for a walk. We’d been in the car for six hours, and I wanted a few minutes with him—just the two of us. I knew the next day’s goodbye would be hard. We turned left at the Post Office and strolled to a bench overlooking a pasture. A few deer grazed, visible, but too far away to be bothered by us. We tried to count them, but one raced around, encouraging others to follow.

“Maybe he has the zoomies, like the dogs,” Atticus murmured.

“Could be,” I agreed.

For a moment, I felt like I had vertigo, my world tilting. I felt tears welling, recalling my son’s birth, his boyhood, his whole life to this moment. I took a deep breath, reached for his hand, remembered that I was the mom, the one to do the comforting. I leaned against him, sniffed—shampoo and hair product and cotton t-shirt—and steadied myself. The air grew cooler, and the sun sank. I looked at Atticus watching the deer and reminded myself that not all loss is permanent. I’d found my pearls after all. He was going but he would not be gone forever. I patted my pocket, remembering that I carry my history and my family with me. 

The edges of the birch leaves in the distance were turning yellow, yielding to the shifting season. They do not get a choice about when to change. Neither, as it happens, did I.  Children grow. Mothers grow. Time passes. 

***

I hugged my son goodbye at college, returned to Ohio, and wore my pearls often those first few months that he was gone. He is finding his way. At night, when I unclasp the strand, before I tuck it into the little drawer, I let the pearls slither through my fingers–precious, lustrous–like memory. 

Ann V. Klotz, a writer, empty-nester, and frequent feeder of her two cats and three dogs. After years of scribbling her thoughts in tiny notebooks, she completed an MFA from Bay Path University in Creative Nonfiction. Her work weaves together reflections on forty-two years of teaching and lessons learned in motherhood. She makes the strongest cup of coffee in the Midwest. With friends, she founded and edits Well-Schooled: the Site for Educator Story Telling  When she's not writing or teaching 9th graders, she can be found needlepointing and running Laurel School in Shaker Heights, OH. Her work has appeared in the Brevity Blog, Yankee Magazine, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, The Manifest Station, Literary Mama, and in a NYT Tiny Love Story. You can read more of her writing at www.annvklotz.com.