I know that I’m having something akin to a midlife crisis because I’m staying up way past my bedtime rewatching old episodes of Grey’s Anatomy.
I’ve begun once more from the very beginning, and if you must know the truth, this show has been the longest, most consistent relationship of my life. I first started watching Grey’s when I was pregnant with Isaac in 2005—the same year the long-running medical drama premiered, and two years before Netflix transitioned into streaming.
Back in the early aughts, Netflix was strictly a mail-based DVD rental service. As a child of the eighties, I grew up in the heyday of Blockbuster video, during a time when you either caught your favorite TV show when it aired, or recorded it on a VHS, hoping no one in your household would unwittingly (or perhaps selfishly) record over the tape. I loved going to the local blue and yellow brick-and-mortar every Friday night to pick out a movie with my Baba and sister; it was a ritual our family of three adopted in the days that followed my mother’s departure, and one that my film-enthusiastic child self looked forward to all week. So when Netflix began shipping DVDs straight to its customer’s mailboxes, I was quick to sign on.
Lonely and bored and pregnant to boot, I filled most evenings catching up on the first season of both LOST and Grey’s, priming myself for what would unknowingly become a lifelong attachment. I’d finish one DVD, send it back in its prepaid envelope, and wait impatiently for the next to arrive. The entirety of my pregnancy was spent on Susquehannock land, 3000 miles away from everyone I knew and loved. I didn’t have anyone in the state of Maryland, save for the milquetoast man who sired my child, so naturally, Meredith and Christina and Derek and Bailey were my companions; their stories brought me comfort, their melodrama was my ritual.
I’ve tried to quit Seattle Grace many times over the past nineteen years. When certain beloved characters met their untimely demise, I wept inconsolably, vowing never to watch the show again. When all but one of the original class of interns remained, I questioned my commitment to this cast of unfamiliar characters. With every new season premier, I say not this time, Shonda. Not again. And yet, I linger. These doctors have a choke hold on me, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t escape the show that taught me about LVAD wires and necrotising fasciitis.
I can’t seem to let go.
I am three glasses deep into a $9 bottle of Trader Joe’s cabernet sauvignon when Meredith’s tryst with Doctor McDreamy is foiled by the return of his estranged wife, and I can’t stop crying. I am revisiting the ghosts of my past, reliving the ardors of bygone days, and reaching for something familiar in the dark. Something with which to tether myself as the tectonic plates of my life shift and dislodge, reshaping themselves into a landscape that is yet unknown to me.
Forty four days of high school. That’s all that’s left for my only child, and beyond that, an adventure all his own. I am emptying my nest, both tangibly and proverbially, purging my belongings and preparing to reduce my material life into one that can fit itself neatly into a van or a trailer or something comparably as small. I don’t know where I’m going to live in three months time; I don’t know what lies ahead. I do know that everything is changing and I’m equal parts excited and afraid and yes, I am grieving, too.
So maybe that’s why it’s midnight on a Tuesday and I’m clinging to this fictional constant, this televised reminder of the days when Isaac was safe and warm inside my womb—when there was still so much life left to live. When I had no idea I would wind up forty-one and chronically single, parenting a child on my own. When I still thought I would birth him a sibling. When I was too young and naive to know the ravages of time.
Maybe it isn’t a midlife crisis after all, but a midlife metamorphosis. Maybe these nights spent alone in my bed watching Grey’s on my laptop are just the remnants of the life I am leaving behind. Maybe what comes next will be something that takes my soul for a joyride, something fresh and new, unsullied by the mistakes of my younger self, unblemished by the graveyard of what never came to be. Maybe I need to submit myself to the chrysalis, undergo the terrifying ordeal of holometabolism, trust that as I digest myself from the inside out, my cells will rearrange themselves into something ready to unfurl—something with the capacity for flight.
When Isaac leaves for college at CalPoly Humboldt, it will be the first time in two decades that I will have the freedom to choose a habitat for me, and me alone. I will be, at once, unencumbered and bereft, and my feelings around it are so complex I don’t even bother trying to pin them down. I will get to choose where and how I live based completely on my own needs and desires, and at the same time I will cease to be a part of his everyday life. I’m beginning to understand that not only do grief and joy coexist, they are dichotomous sides of the same coin.
It’s possible that I will live the next few years nomadically; that I will forgo a permanent address and submit myself to the ways of my desert dwelling ancestors. That I will meet compelling creatures along the way. Maybe this second act will introduce a new character, someone with the potential for longevity. Someone whose edges align with my own. Maybe, inshallah, I’ll find someone worthy of sharing my life, a person to call home. The uncertainty of it all is terrifying, to be sure, but there is a fortuitous quality that underlines the fear—a lotto ticket scratching kind of excitement about what’s on the other side.
I leave you now, not with words of closure or how to navigate such a transitional time as this, but to watch season 2, episode 13. I don’t know what my future holds or how I’ll receive it, just the same as I didn’t know eighteen years ago when my son was born. But I know how to allow. I know how to surrender. I know how to cry into a pillow and wake the next morning reborn. I know how to figure it out as I go along, and I suppose that is what I’ll keep doing.
The way you share things is both comforting and inspiring. Thank you. ❤️
I love this. Mine is only 11, and sometimes I catch myself staring at baby pictures and crying my eyes out. Thank you for being so relatable and real. ❤️