Transitions always seem to trip me up.

When I was young, I was fairly precocious; I walked early and learned to read before kindergarten.

I skipped a grade in school. I loved going to school, but I struggled leaving my mom and dad. I felt torn in two; off-balance.

Yes, I wanted to read and make new friends, but I also wanted to be at home with my dolls, near my mommy, away from what I already sensed was a treadmill.

A place that would exterminate my fantasies and daydreams, and immaturity, really.

I felt more emotional, more prone to homesickness, than my friends. I constantly weighed the losses vs the gains and feeling secure usually trumped being adventurous or daring.

I dreaded having a babysitter when our parents went out, sleepovers made me anxious.

I felt out of step socially, more vulnerable. I had trouble putting small setbacks behind me, like the other kids seemed able to do.

And when my family moved to another city, it was hard to feel settled in the new home – not really – the nostalgia for the old home always bled through.

This melancholy thing was a thing even up until college. I remember feeling my gut drop and an ache inside as I watched my mom’s car pull away when she dropped me off freshman year.

And every year after that.

It happened at every goodbye, every tiny transition.

Even driving away from our wedding reception, I remember crying.

From joy and sheer exhaustion, but also because I didn’t want to leave my family – my old life, the old me, the homesick kid.

Today, I ran past the old high school where my kids went, and I felt it, that familiar tug. The passage of time. A tightening in my chest. The memories that come up.

The little moments – dropping off my son’s forgotten lunch, an anxious parent teacher conference with my daughter.

How much I cared. God those endless, labile days – up and down with each kid on a different emotion.

The endless soccer games, the striving to be present through it all.

My friend and I talk about melancholy vs. depression. I think melancholy can very easily slide into depression.

They share the same capricious nature – the sadness can come on for no discerneble reason.

And it can hang on, believe me.

The term melancholy has gotten a romantic tag – but I think it’s really just a grey-tinted wistfulness that can border on obsession and can snowball downhill quickly.

But for me, melancholy is a feeling, whereas depression is a lack of feeling.

As with all of this, I am grateful to watch my little family change, expand and move on, in various configurations.

I think maybe melancholy is a special flavor reserved for the old.

And I am annoyed at the world’s insistence that we move so quickly through things, that we stuff down the tenderness that pulls at the seams, sometimes with a rendering that is traumatic.

But the melancholy serves a purpose. It reminds me of the pain that makes me alive. Complex and incomprehensable, it is life.

It is the big love that can’t stay contained in one small thing.

Middle age and after is a reckoning with the folly of a youth that insists we must love simply, without heartache, or regret or any residue of pain or mess.

At 60, I know that the broken shards, spilled cups, and forgetting and screwing up are the whole of it, not the edges.

Anyway, these days I still miss my kids, who aren’t kids anymore. Maybe I miss my marriage too, the way it was 35 years ago.

But only with the melancholy.

If I really look at it, I see that what looks like leaving is really coming home a different route.

And what seems like growing distant is actually a seasoning into a deeper kind of intimacy.

Nowadays there is this complicated longing inside me when I love my family.

I think it’s my friend melancholy at work and it feels just as it should, like melancholy.