去年秋天,我的朋友照片张贴在Instagram of her teenage daughter, who was heading off to college, with a caption that read something like, “So you take care of them for 18 years and they just leave?!”

This was highly relatable. As parents, as our children get older, we shift from celebrating all their firsts — steps, smiles, school — to that stage where you are struck with the realization that it’s your job to prepare your child to be independent, or to be blunt, to survive, thrive even, without you.

Heidi Julavits describes this feeling perfectly in her second memoir, “Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years.” My childhood, she writes, and theirs “are both behind me, visible only from a great height and impossible to touch. I’ve been grieving this moment for years in advance, reduced myself, at times, to head-holding, breathless despair. It’s over, it’s over, it’s over.”

In her previous memoir, “The Folded Clock: A Diary,” published in 2015, Julavits’ days took a different shape. In one chapter, she’s hopping on a red-eye to Los Angeles, in another, she’s joined her husband for an artist residency in Germany or is discussing infidelity with a friend over cocktails. Her life is full of the ennui and angst one might fairly associate with a young novelist — Julavits has written four — in New York City. Nearly a decade later, in “Directions to Myself,” she’s a mother of two young children, dividing her time between New York, where she teaches, and Maine, where she grew up. Life has become not less full, but it’s fullness of a different sort. There is a family to take care of, courses to teach, an old house to fix. As her parents had before her, Julavits buys a sailboat despite a warning from her own brother: “If you do that, your children will hate you.”

But she buys it, of course, as we all do in our way, wanting to show to our kids how things were for us — even when those things weren’t always great. So much of this book is about longing, about nostalgia, about a “homesickness for homesickness,” Julavits writes. Maine is the place where Julavits feels this most intensely, especially as her son shifts his attention from her to his peers.

Back in the city are stresses of a different sort — darker, even sinister. Though the “four years” of her title certainly refers to her son’s growth from ages 6 to 10, the persistent unease of the Trump presidency is implicit, and the specter of #metoo is everywhere. Julavits provides just enough detail to evoke contemporary events of the period. She worries about her own son in this world of bad men — will she raise someone who will ultimately behave this way?

“Directions to Myself” is a series of vignettes, an open airing of the worries and fears of a woman in the 21st century, an ode to books and streams and rocks and artifacts and to family. But it might be, above all, about nature, human and otherwise. Julavits is in awe both of its beauty and its capacity to do harm. “Nature is always a warning,” she writes. “Slow down. Time is moving quickly, why must you move so quickly through it?”

Allison Arieff is a freelance writer.