I didn’t get a gap year either. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree and rushed home to start the same summer job I’d had the year before. Then, in mid-August, I quit and got married. Within two weeks, I was starting graduate school. It was supposed to be a one year degree, but since kid number one came along at the end of the year, it turned into a two year degree. And I have been in my “constrained years” ever since. But the end is coming into sight. Child number 5, my baby, is in 8th grade. In four and a half more years, she’ll graduate, and all of my kids will be out of the home. I can’t decide if that looks like a gap, or a yawning abyss. But I’m not afraid of the hole the kids will leave in my life because . . . I just became a grandmother!