When August Hurts
August. For me, it’s perhaps the hardest time of the year. Sometimes I go as long as two weeks without my children. Right after the divorce, it actually felt like fun—being free again, having time for myself, traveling, not having to adjust to anyone.
Enjoying the quiet. Really hearing the silence. Only then did I realize how much pressure I had been under before. When the kids were home, I never noticed it. But after noisy little Kende left, the hot, heavy silence settled over me and the house, broken only by the sound of a plane overhead, the still trees, the burning sun. Life seemed to stop. Even the phone barely rang. Over time—seven years now since my ex-husband moved out—Augusts have only grown harder. In the empty house, everything reminds me of the broken family, everything of the children: the garden steps where three-year-old Kíra once fell and split her lip, bleeding badly; the pool where their sticky little hands clung to me so tightly I couldn’t move; the railing they climbed like little monkeys; the hammock on the terrace where Karsa slept and where we read stories together in the evenings. All of that is in the past now. Normally, I don’t even think about it. But somehow in August I slow down, and whether I want to or not, I drift back in time, reliving what has passed but still lives inside me.
The first ten years were especially hard. Looking back, I often wonder how I managed at all. Three children in four years, and the first two were slow to become independent. For three years, Kende woke up eight times a night, every night, while I was carrying and then nursing Karsa. Kende didn’t speak until he was five—but if we couldn’t guess his unspoken thoughts, he would bite hard. In his tantrums, he would run headfirst into the wall again and again while I watched, helpless. All three were in diapers at the same time, and sometimes I couldn’t leave the house for weeks without help. Once, while feeding Kende and nursing Karsa, I forgot about Kíra on the potty—by the time I got to her, she had painted a mural on the wall with poop. Those years blur together now, endless at the time. Yet even then, a voice inside whispered that time should not be rushed—it passes too quickly anyway. So I tried to enjoy every moment, especially once I learned that two of my children were autistic. I even sold my business so I could devote myself fully to them. That was not an easy decision—I agonized for months, even years, losing sleep over what would happen to my life, my career, our security, and who I would be after giving up the independence I had always loved.
But no answer ever came. There was only the present, and the unpredictable future that is so typical with children like mine. They constantly pulled me back into the now—into an isolated life that couldn’t be planned. And strangely, I came to enjoy every minute of it—not only because they needed me, but because over time, I needed them too.
There’s a Sufi tale I once read, and The Little Prince says the same: the more time you give someone, the more they mean to you. With children who have special needs, the bond is even stronger, the symbiosis deeper, and time slows down—because they may never become independent, or only much later. And what parent doesn’t wish for their child to live independently? I’ve done everything I possibly could to support my two autistic children in this, even knowing it means they’ll need me less and less. Strangely, that’s not liberation—it’s a double grief. It hurts that they’re not independent yet, and it hurts when they are, because it means they no longer need me as much. Of course, it’s also joy—deep, incomparable joy. But for someone who has sacrificed her career, her freedom, her very life for that independence, it is also pain. Emptiness, loss of meaning, being stuck in a void. Because after that, what else could possibly matter? What activity could compare, when they had become the very meaning of my life?
For eighteen years I couldn’t leave my children alone. Only in the past year have I allowed myself to step outside my self-imposed confinement for an hour or two. Until now, the longest I had ever been apart from them was two weeks in August, when they were with their father. But this year, for the first time, things turned out differently. After our vacation, Kíra and Kende stayed with my parents in the countryside, and Karsa—the youngest—suddenly started living his teenage life, almost never at home. As if making up for all the years spent inside, he now only shows up to eat—and sometimes not even that. Just like a cat.
And so this strange silence—though I know one of my children may never live completely independently and may always be with me longer than a typical child—still feels like an empty pit, a black hole. I shop, but for whom? I bake, but who will eat it? I finally have time to make plans with them, but they don’t want to come with me. So I search for myself in the past and try to build a future that’s livable, one where not everything revolves around my children—so that I won’t be a burden to them, even though I know they’ll always need me.
I sit, looking at the empty pool where they once clung to me so tightly I could barely breathe, and the tears fall. I listen to the endless silence, waiting until I hit the very bottom of this lonely pit—so that from there, a new future can begin to take shape. A future where I am no longer living only for my children. A future where, maybe one day, I will finally be me again.
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