The Big Empty

EMPTY NESTER: (n.) a parent whose children have grown up and left home.

 If you know anything about birds, you know those little fledglings don't always make the grand gesture and fly away on wings outstretched.  They take tumbles from the nest before flight is possible. They're kidnapped by orange tomcats named Fabio and left in disarray on someone's back porch. They succumb to mites, disease or starvation.  And roughly half of those that do leave of their own volition will not gracefully soar into maturity but will plummet to earth, victim to other myriad dangers.



Translate those facts to the human world and do the math for our babies.  My babies.  That children even survive childhood blows my mind.  Because it ain't like THEY'RE concerned with their mortality when they attempt to climb bookshelves as toddlers, jump their skateboards over precarious constructions in the driveway, climb out their bedroom window for a midnight joyride, swing from ropes into rock-walled waters, slam shots of cheap vodka at a teen party or carry a wobbly pile of lawn furniture off the back of a moving truck!  And that mini-list doesn't account for those elements of danger outside of their reckoning: childhood diabetes, cancers, dog attacks, kidnapping, house fires and anything you've watched on Oprah or the morning news.

Though our children mature, surrender to hormones and adopt the physical traits of men and women, us parents have only to close our eyes to allow the soft-cheeked faces of our young to slide into focus. While my three are presently in their 20's, I imagine I'll possess the requisite memory to conjure the images of their youthful selves in MY head when the hairs on THEIR heads transition to gray.

But it's that in-between time that can trip up us parents.  Decades stacking upon decade, sandwiching college, careers, marriage, children, travel, travail and adventure into lives carried on in other physical places where mom and dad don't rule the roost.  The new frontier of childless bedrooms where tumbleweeds blow across the quiet floorboards.  A living room of clean air not sullied by the contrails of competing colognes, perfumes and body sprays on weekday mornings.  Cars resting in the driveway, free from the here-and-there obligations of sports, school projects and sleepovers.

And that was just high school.


Adult children in the home presented a host of challenges and developments of an even more complex degree.  Despite my best efforts, treating my kids as grown-ups while they lived out of studio apartments which suspiciously resembled their childhood bedrooms, coming and going on their own schedules, but still retaining that aura of teen daughter and teen son, scrambled my brain AND my emotions -- a big fat pile of UGH!  When the girl who dated her boyfriend for over five, maybe six, years from the headquarters of our home finally wed and moved out, taking her cat and belongings with her, we were ALL more than ready for it.  When the boy who resided in the corner room of the Three Bridge Road fixer-upper boarded a plane bound for a Navy base in Illinois for basic training last November after a year of battling wills similar to a clash of the titans, the entire family heaved a collective sigh of relief!  And lest we forget, the middle child started this slow exodus of our progeny after her first year of college away from home when she married her Army high school sweetheart and joined him on an entirely separate continent.  Talk about flying from the nest!

Jimmy, the Jimster, Jim Bob, my husband of, um, is it 27 years now, babe (where does THAT question mark go?) and I have joined the ranks of the many, the proud, the still somewhat worried but excited, the rather confused and conflicted -- the Empty Nesters.  I don't really know what that looks like.  Except that two adults are rattling about in a spacious home in need of work, where two sweet white dogs and an active kitten wait outside the bathroom doors for us instead of toddlers and adolescents.








While I can't fully speak for my husband, being his wife means I sometimes TRY to speak for him.  Isn't that a stereotype with some merit?  (Insert smiley face emoticon with one eye closed and tongue sticking out here.)





He watches football games without the companionship of true fans sharing the couch.  I try.  But I ask too many questions.  He resorts to singsonging nicknames for Hankie Mutt because "HI! Sarah-A-Ma-a-a!" isn't around to hear hers.  He continues to tease me without mercy but there's no one to applaud and cheer his amusing efforts.  Quite honestly, dad could have used a bit more semi-full nest time.  I know that.




          


And then there's mom, Dolly, Gloria to you folks.



















I believe most young adult children NEED to depart from the nest to really experience those life epiphanies which expand the brain and widen their perspectives.  I think kids develop independence when they must actually BE independent.  Take themselves to work. Buy their own deodorant and toothpaste.  Decide when and what to eat.




Become their own alarm clock, for Pete's sake.  When they don't walk through the front door and hear their parent(s) asking if they made their beds and emptied the trash after they just completed a semester final in biology or clocked-off after eight hours on their feet waiting tables.













It alters the dynamic between the two factions; a dynamic which requires change for the health of both parties.  Clearly, this is brief and simplistic.  I realize it's a process.  Not an instant event with a sharp line of delineation.  But I know of moms and dads who would love for their kids to live at home, or live next door, forever and an extra day after that.  I.  Am.  Not.  That.  Parent.  A-a-a-nd . . . I love, love, LOVE my one boy and two girls in ways both deep and wide.









I miss hugging my kids.  I miss watching my kids interact with each other and with their dad.  I miss face-to-face conversations though FaceTime is a blessing!  I miss the shouts of outrage my girls would direct at their brother when he hid around corners and jumped out when they weren't expecting it!  (How many times can that happen before they develop immunity?!)  I miss how our boy would hold any of our trio of animals like a baby and they loved it . . . and him.  On the practical side, I miss drivers who shopped for me.  Other sets of hands which scrubbed toilets.  Legs that walked the mutts and tossed sticks for them.  Dates for Starbucks with other latte fans.  So, yes, I do miss my children.  And, yes, there resides within me a great joy for the paths upon which they now trod apart from me.  It is the great parental dichotomy.  It's life, L-I-F-E, man.

Before I sign off, let me just say my co-parent and I quite like one another.  We're not strangers who need to be reintroduced.  We didn't live for the children and neglect to make eye contact with the person who helped produce said children.  The spark of attraction remains: the force is strong between us, says Yoda.  Wink, WINK.  Together, we are wending our way through laughter and tears, highs and lows, questions and answers, work, church, surgery, hormones, this big broken but functioning house in the little woods, and realizing that though the physical nest is empty, the heart nest remains ever full.