Rethinking An Empty Nest

Since I wrote my last post about being an empty-nester, I’ve been feeling a little blue, even though I received some wonderfully generous comments from other parents who get what I’m saying.  (Your support is very, very welcome.  Thank you, all.)

But then God or the Universe or whatever decided that I had had enough wallowing.  And brought me to a blog written by a young father of two (http://growingsideways.net/2012/02/07/an-entire-week-boiled-down-to-two-disgusting-minutes/).  Whereupon I remembered a night about twenty-one years ago.  A night that will never be forgotten by three of the four people who lived it. 

The night in question involved communal, familial vomiting.  It involved the Baby Who Started It All and then mercifully and uncharacteristically slept for ten hours.  It involved a five-year-old boy who moaned every twenty minutes, “Mommy, I don’t like this!” and then threw up again, sometimes in the toilet, sometimes not.  It involved a (then-) husband who raced home from his late-night job to be ill loudly and repeatedly.  It involved me standing in the kitchen guzzling orange juice, knowing full well that I was going to barf it up in the sink before I could get to the bathroom.

At around 3 am, I turned my head to look at my husband.  He, I, and the boy were lying on the guest bed to avoid waking up the baby.  My eyelashes hurt.

“I would trade a year of my life for a ginger ale,” I said.

Whereupon then-husband staggered to his feet, got in the car, and drove to Safeway (where they remembered him from the week before, when he’d shown up in the middle of the night to buy tomato juice for the dog who’d just been skunked).  And returned with a big bottle of Canada Dry.

We may be divorced, but I will never forget his gallantry that night.  (Or what he sounded like throwing up.  It was kind of terrifying.   Women don’t sound like that.)

Remembering all this, I can laugh (a little).  I think most families live through at least one night like this.  It becomes lore.  It bonds you.

But it’s really hideous, and I don’t ever want to do it again.

So thanks, Kevin Hartnett, for reminding me that a nest populated by two middle-aged birds who are meticulous about getting their flu shots has an upside. 

An Empty Nest Is for the Birds

My children are 26 and 22, but when I dream of them, they are usually about 10 and 6. 

I don’t know why this is.

I’ve read New-Age spiritualists who say that everyone on the other side is about 30, and that we will recognize our friends and family even if we never knew them at this age.  Not sure how these theorists have come to these revelations, but I sort of believe it.  Or maybe I just want to.  Thirty is a good age to be for eternity.

When I’m awake, I picture my children as they are today: young adults, my son tall and bearded, my daughter with cool boots and a chic haircut.  But asleep, I see them as they used to be.  Is it because at ages 10 and 6, they had settled comfortably into life, with friends and interests they have to this day?  Is it because I enjoyed this period of motherhood so much, happy not to be merely a live-in nursemaid but not yet having to contend with the anxiety brought on by teenager-hood?  Is it because this is when they still enjoyed hanging around with me?   Is it because they—we—were still untouched by divorce?

I don’t write very often about how I miss my kids.  (This is because I don’t like to write about things that might embarrass or upset them, but what the hell: they probably don’t even read this.)  For one thing, they are wonderful about keeping in touch with me.  I saw my daughter yesterday; I visited my son in L.A. two weeks ago.  I talk to them on the phone often.  I am lucky, lucky, lucky, and I know it and acknowledge it every day of my life.

But that doesn’t keep me from occasional melancholy and a deep longing for something that is gone, finished.

Society as a whole laughs at parents who feel sad that their kids have left home.  Either that, or we are admonished, told that we should be happy our kids are doing well and becoming productive citizens and what, we should want them to live in our basements when they’re forty? 

I resent all this.  I am thrilled that my children are on their own, living their lives, becoming yet more themselves.  I wouldn’t have it any other way.  But don’t tell me to be embarrassed about feeling sad. 

Motherhood changed me so profoundly.  In one instant, I became a completely different person.  And the thing about an empty nest is that you change again, but it’s not instantaneous and it’s not complete.  You’re still and always a mother, but now you have to be a regular person again, too.

In my dreams, my kids are usually trying to help me find something.

When I’m asleep, I don’t know what it is.  But when I wake up, I think I do.

The Perils and Perks of Aging

Middle age is fraught with unpleasantness. Your body begins to turn on you in vicious and previously unimagined ways. Your adult children make known their grievances. If you are a woman, you become invisible to males under the age of forty. Despite being the high point of Sunday nights, “Mad Men” makes you wonder for the first time in years what your parents’ sex lives were really like.

This is not to say that being middle-aged is without benefits. There are a lot of things I like about being fifty-two. There’s the fact that I no longer bleed on a monthly basis. That’s something. And I like not having to pretend to enjoy rock concerts anymore. Plus, there is the fact that I know all kinds of things of which younger people are ignorant: which actors played the brothers on “Here Come the Brides,” for instance, and what it was like to ride a bike without a helmet, and how it felt to be able to wander your neighborhood entirely beyond the reach of the parental units, who were unabashedly thrilled to be rid of you.

But it is safe to say that, in general, being “of a certain age” sucks ass. I’ve asked my friends, and most of them say that they hate the changes in their physical appearance, the increasing number of doctors’ appointments penciled in on their calendars, the realization that they can no longer run as far or as fast as they used to, the sense of being “peripheralized” by the media (and teenage girls), the notion that the world is really intended for younger people, the fading of memories, the way newsprint seems to get smaller and blurrier, the ever-increasing number of pills on the nightstand. There’s no denying it. No one would choose to age if the other available option was Stay Young Forever.

So I’ve decided to remind myself, on a regular and public basis, of some of the nice things that have happened to me since I’ve turned fifty. To wit:

--My daughter was graduated from high school;
--My son was graduated from college and had relatively little trouble finding a job with a salary that allows him to pay his own bills;
--I saw Paris for the first time with someone I love;
--I sold my house for more than it was objectively worth, in time to avoid the recent economic collapse;
--I moved in with my boyfriend (which brings to mind yet another indignity associated with aging: the absence of a reasonable word with which to refer to one’s significant other when one is over the age of thirty and unmarried);
--I now live in a beautiful part of the world that features fog, crashing surf, pelicans, sea lions, a non-working lighthouse, and KPIG reception;
--My colonoscopy was clean;
--My kids usually pick up their phones when I call;
--I have a new book coming out early next year;
--I read Amy Bloom’s AWAY;
--I am currently planning my mother’s ninetieth birthday celebration;
--I am still able to wear the same size jeans that I’ve worn for ten years.

That’s twelve things to be happy about, my ever-threatening physical decline notwithstanding. That’s not bad.

I will try to remember all this tomorrow as I stand in line at the pharmacy, waiting to refill three prescriptions and buy new reading glasses to replace the ones I’ve unaccountably misplaced.