There was a long day this summer in which I functioned as co-pilot while my son drove an hour and a half to his camp in New Jersey. 

I dropped him off, taking his car to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where my daughter was scuba diving to 45 feet in a quarry filled with buses and planes and helicopters. 

And I thought, “This. This day right here is so wonderful. But it’s also the closest I’m ever going to come to losing my mind.” 

Because the goal is to get your kids independent even if that independence means they’re driving New Jersey’s highways with lunatics failing to grasp the physics of automobiles.  

Honey, if the car in front of my child is going 65 miles per hour, and my child is obeying the four-second rule like a rational human being, he cannot, in fact, go any faster without hitting the car in front of him. 

So kindly remove your head from my child’s esophagus because he is not risking a speeding ticket for you. 

And the 45-foot scuba dive. You guys know how I feel about scuba. But scuba diving with airplanes beneath you? I mean, do you want to die? 

What if you get stuck in the airplane? What if – what if someone put their pet alligator in that quarry and now he’s, like, seven feet long and hungry? And have you never seen The Deep House? 

My daughter was doing that dive to get her advanced open water scuba diving certification. Advanced open water certification means you can dive deeper, so to achieve the certification you have to, well, dive deeper. 

That I was on the highway, driving from central Jersey to Bethlehem, so far from my kid while she was 45 feet underwater — hoo boy. That was tough.  

And before you ask, yes. I think my physically being in Bethlehem, on terra firma, keeps my kid from getting The Deep House treatment. 

My kids being out in the world is a joy and sadness hard to describe. But that paled in comparison to what happened a few weeks later.  

My daughter had gone back to college, my son was back at school for his senior year, working evenings, and my husband was eyeing the calendar, anticipating an autumn full of hunting and hiking. 

And I was floundering. 

Over the last few years, with the kids working and traveling and just plain gone, getting dinner on the table became a challenge. 

I tried planning meals for the week, buying ingredients for family dinners on Friday or Monday. Inevitably, those ingredients would rot as one person after another begged off dinner to work or commune with deer or something. 

Then I tried shopping for dinner ingredients the day I planned to cook the dinner. But so often, the day would get away from me. By the time I was home and ready to cook, the two hours I needed to get the food on the table evaporated. 

And my personal policy has always been if one of us is not home for dinner, I don’t cook.  

“I do that, too!” my friend said one day. “Why is it,” she asked, “that one person’s absence means no one gets a home cooked meal? Isn’t that weird?” 

It is weird. And now, with one of us gone all the time, I wanted to get dinner, well, back on the table. 

So a few weeks ago, I sat my guys down. Talk to me, I said. How do I get dinner on the table? 

“I don’t want dinner,” my son said. “There’s too much pressure to get home from the gym or work. I’ll just cook for myself.” 

“Yeah,” my husband concurred. “I prefer we live like roommates. I can fend for myself.” 

“Oh — OK,” I said. “That — that’s fine.” 

It seems those years I spent with all of Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbooks, dedicating my grocery purchases to miso and pink Himalayan salt, learning how to cook an entire chicken or use dates to mimic sugar so my brownies were a little bit healthy — they were kind of annoying. 

I should have been relieved.  

And I was. 

Mostly.  

No more wasted food. No more evenings sweating over proteins doggedly pink on the inside. No more trips to the grocery store.  

I mean, the grocery store is not my favorite. I’d almost — almost — rather scuba dive to the sunken airplane in Bethlehem. 

Almost. I mean, I don’t have a death wish. When the sunken people in The Deep House open their eyes —

Sorry. Distracted. 

But also, the decision to end family dinners stung. It was one more yellow brick in the road taking my kids from me to the world of the great and wonderful Oz. 

Mentally, I was a forlorn kid walking down the street, listlessly kicking at stones and curbs. 

Last week, my husband’s mom and I went to see the sixtieth anniversary rerelease of The Sound of Music at the movie theater. 

As did, I think, every woman in Bucks County over the age of 50. 

They’re my people now.

And do you know what? 
 
Popcorn and peanut M&M’s make a pretty good dinner.