Coping with 'The Goodbye Year'

In 2004, when Toni Piccinini’s oldest child was starting her senior year of high school, the mother of three was overcome with a sense of sadness and finality.

“I loved being a mom,” Piccinini said in a phone interview from her home in Kentfield. “I just felt this gigantic shift coming, and a strong sense of an ending. I felt like, ‘This is over.’”

To help stay afloat emotionally, she threw herself into the culinary life she once had as a restaurateur in San Francisco. But this time around, she gave cooking classes to her friends, most of whom were going through the same separation anxiety.

Piccinini spun the cooking classes into an essay, the essay caught the attention of a book editor, and a few years later it expanded into a nourishing, 12-chapter book, “The Goodbye Year: Wisdom and Culinary Therapy to Survive Your Child’s Senior Year of High School” (2013, Seal Press, $16).

Part memoir, part self-help book and part cookbook, “The Goodbye Year” delves candidly into the rocky, midlife transition of a mother struggling to let go of her only daughter, Page, while reclaiming the self before she was someone’s mom.

“Fulfilling the demands of mothering the ship requires you to spin with such power that the centrifugal force alone has sustained things,” she writes. “You have got to look this tornado right in the eye, ladies. It may feel like all the plates your have kept aloft are going to come crashing down. Some surely will. But it doesn’t have to end with regrets and resignation .?.?. or divorce.”

During their children’s senior year, moms go from celebrating all kinds of “firsts” to mourning a year of “lasts” - the last back-to-school night, the last parent-teacher conference and the last time the family will be together in the same way.

“This is a very big change in a woman’s life, when for 18 to 20 years, she’s really been devoted to another person,” Piccinini said. “And now that person is leaving, and there is a big hole.”

With 12 chapters, each devoted to a month, the book guides readers through the insanity of the final year of high school, from the challenges of college applications and rejections to the joyful acceptances and the tearful dorm-room drop-offs.

Each chapter ends with a metaphoric recipe, ranging from a comforting Risotto with Sugar Pie Pumpkin in the fall to a celebratory Sea Scallops with Orzo in the spring.

Each chapter also provides a “to-do” assignment, designed to get moms thinking ahead to the “Me Years” with the promise of freedom, creativity and a new kind of relationship with their adult children.

“By the time they’re seniors in high school, are you really going to give them life lessons?” she asked. “They’re starting their journey. They’re going to make colossal mistakes and deal with the consequences, and you’re there to support them and love them, but you’re not there to take away their experiences.”

One of the problems with parenting today is what Piccinini calls “mom pressure.” Instead of banding together, “helicopter moms” compete to get their children into the best schools, colleges and internships. If you don’t play the game, you feel like you’re not a good mom. But it doesn’t always pay off.

“A girlfriend of mine got her son into a private high school and an expensive small college, and that kid just bombed out royally,” Piccinini said. “She was really bummed out, and I know that she felt she had done something wrong.”

Instead of falling victim to mom pressure, Piccinini suggests bonding with other mothers and cheering them up when their children stumble. Other assignments include taking a new class, starting a gratitude journal and helping out at a homeless shelter.

For Piccinini, the first step in her mid-life transition was acknowledging her grief rather than pushing it aside.

“You’re there with it, and then you’ve got to say, ‘What do I want to do about this?’?” she said. “That takes some time.”

For Piccinini, the transition took about four years, the same amount of time it took her daughter to graduate from college.

Along the way, she also acknowledged that her relationship with her husband had been swept under the carpet.

“So much of our life was the family, and our communication was exclusively about the family,” she said. “When that’s gone, what are our conversations about?”

She advises accepting that you have different interests than your husband and realizing that he also may be mourning the end of an era.

Meanwhile, it’s key for moms-in-transition to start making their own lives a priority. Go back to school, start a new hobby, and don’t be afraid to reinvent yourself.

“Pretend that you’ve just met you,” she said. “You’d treat yourself a lot nicer, and you’d fall in love with yourself instead of beating yourself up so much.”

Since her daughter’s senior year, Piccinini has said goodbye to two sons as well, each one following a different path. Along the way, she learned to let go of “the whole timeline deal.”

“What’s the rush?” she said. “So what if it takes them six years to get their degree? I would really like to champion these wonderful things like home economics and auto body in high school, because those are wonderful, noble professions.”

But Piccinini has not let go of the family car, a 1995 Isuzu Trooper she bought nearly 20 years ago.

“It’s the car that held the car seats, the car we took to Tahoe,” she said. “I feel the echoes of my children’s spirits are in that car.”

Staff Writer Diane Peterson can be reached at 521-5287 or diane.peterson@pressdemocrat.com.