Parenting: EMPTY NEST
by Joyce Maynard
Five years have passed now since the youngest of my three children left
home. It has taken most of that time to get used to the idea that after
25 years of caring for them -- cooking, shopping, driving, counting heads,
playing, warning, reminding and, most of all, just having them around
and thinking about them -- there are no more piles of big sneakers in
my front hall, no backpacks and smelly socks and hair ornaments and towels
on the floor, no more hip hop blaring and girlfriends on the phone and
unexplained dents in the fender and early mornings trying to rouse them
for school and late night talks in the kitchen, sharing leftover pie.
Except for times I invite friends over, there is nobody at my house to
bake pie for. There is no one living at my house now but me.
Life is a lot quieter without the children, and, in many ways, a lot easier, except for one thing: sometimes it feels harder, having them gone. For over two decades, my number one pursuit was raising my children well, and now the job is over, and here I stand, like some high-level, high-stress, (but low paid) C.E.O., whose company got bought out. I still have my friends, and my work, and plenty of interests and passions. But there's a big vacant place that used to be occupied by the mothering part. I never much warmed to the phrase "empty-nester", but that's what they call me. And so, in the same way that my children had to learn how to live without me around, I had to learn how to live alone, without them.
In my case, moving on to this new phase of life was made more striking by the fact of being single. I have friends my age, for whom the moment when the last child left for college or a job meant a return to a kind of togetherness and intimacy they hadn't known since the early days of marriage. For me, a lot of the last six years has been about developing new interests, exploring things I had neglected for all those years when the children came first. I discovered the freedom that came in not having to cook dinner every night. One winter I took off for Guatemala and studied Spanish; another I learned to salsa dance and joined a figure drawing class. I watched my grocery bills go down. Ten days went by in which I didn't have to do any laundry. I explored what it might be to have a relationship with a man, that didn't involve children, either mine or his. All of this was good.
But one thing did not change, and that was the need to stay close with my two sons and my daughter, even though all three of them lived far away. And so I had to learn new ways of doing that.
In the early years, after the last of my kids -- Willy -- moved out, I was still locked into our old ways of spending time together. I thought we'd do things the way we used to -- just less often. So I kept their rooms ready and waited for them to make visits home, baking all their favorite desserts in advance.
But as the years passed, they had less and less time for visits; and, as happy as they were to see me, when they came back, the center of their world was no longer our house or the town in which they'd once lived. Just as the past was becoming more distant every day, my children's lives were filling up with more and more experiences that I didn't share with them. I didn't know their friends anymore. I hadn't laid eyes on the places they worked. There were whole countries they'd lived in that I'd never visited. With every passing season, the territory we shared -- their growing up years -- represented a smaller and smaller portion of their lives so far.
Some of this is unavoidable, I know. And just as every parent, if she is wise, must accept that children grow up, move on and build lives of their own, so too, I believe, must the parent who wishes to continue building relationships with her children create experiences not in the past but in the present, and even the future.
In my case, recognizing as I did that it was unlikely my children would ever again spend more than a few days at home with me, I learned to go to them. They carry on with their lives; I just fit myself into their schedules. I have learned to be adaptable. I sleep on their couches; I eat tofurkey for Thanksgiving dinner. I'm visiting and that's what they cook.
Sometimes, instead of going to visit my kids, we take a trip together. A few years back, my daughter and I drove up the coast of California, into Oregon, and then Washington State, to British Columbia. We had no itinerary, though we kept a book in the glove compartment of great nature trails and natural hot springs; occasionally we'd hike in to some quiet spot where we could just soak for a few hours and talk. She brought along some music to share with me and I did the same. At night, we went out to dinner, or got pizza and shared it in some funky motel room, watching a movie or reading out loud to each other from a novel we'd decided to share on the trip. When we reached the Canadian border, she had to take off on a bus, while I journeyed north. But the parting wasn't a sad one. We'd had such a precious stretch of days we knew they'd stay with us.
It is not always smooth, this business of spending time with adult children in a way that acknowledges not simply the bonds you share with them but also their separateness. Case in point: My daughter Audrey loves to dance, and she's a natural. On a cooking school trip we took together to Mexico, she quickly located a couple of clubs in Oaxaca; I stayed for a couple of songs but at 11:30, ready for bed, I returned to our nearby hotel.
When I woke up at 2:30 a.m. and saw her bed was empty, I panicked. But just as I headed out to look for her, she returned -- escorted by an exceedingly courtly young man who assured me he would never have let my daughter walk back to our hotel alone. "You aren't always going to be around to watch out for me, Mama," she reminded me. "I spend a lot of evenings this way. You just aren't usually there to know about it."
I can't say all my worry disappeared that night, any more than I can pretend I like it when Will rides his bicycle with his helmet attached to the back with a bungee cord (rather than on his head where it belongs, so he can feel the wind in his hair. ) Or that Charlie once walked around for a week on what turned out to be a broken ankle (from snowboarding) out of a desire to save the cost of a visit to the emergency room. But I also know that in the same way that being a good parent of young children means holding them close and watching them carefully, part of being a good parent to children after they've left home means letting them go and trusting that you've done your job well enough for them to know how to take care of themselves.
Meanwhile, I mother by long distance. I pick up the phone at odd moments, sometimes for a heart-to-heart, but just as often to share with them some very small thing. I clip a news story out of the paper and stick it in an envelope, or order a book I think one of them might like and have it delivered. I spot a wide tie from the ‘60s in a used clothing store and send it off to Charlie, or drop a gift certificate to Victoria's Secret in the mail to Audrey, for Valentine's Day -- or possibly no holiday at all. I bank my frequent flyer miles. I email. Come Thanksgiving, I may well pack up my pie baking tools and get on a plane for one or another of their apartments, as I did last year. I honor the lives my children have made on their own, and remind them too, I hope, that they have a mother. We are configured differently now. But we're still a family.
RECOMMEND JOYCEMAYNARD.COM TO A FRIEND
