Gratitude, Loss, and Decentering Children
While I tend to love imagery of flight, crows, cardinals, robins, sparrows, hawks, soaring, and enjoy watching birds, I hate the term “empty nester”. I might be inclined to hate it because it feels like a pop way to understand (or oversimplify) and overgeneralize what may be an individual and profound event worthy of more than a catch phrase. It feels dismissive and also, while I get the imagery, it doesn’t really make sense to me. I hated the phrase far before reaching days when it might be applied to me, so my feelings toward the term aren’t primarily out of any egotism. But my home is never empty. It can’t be with me in it, the cats, my work, music, and always something there to remind me.
For the past three weeks, I’ve periodically announced openly in social settings, to friends and acquaintances, “I’m working to normalize public weeping.” And still I laugh much more than cry, but I do cry. That some have called me “depressed” seems weird to me. I’ve been many things recently, but not depressed. I might say I’ve experienced sadness, missing, heartache, sorrow, melancholy, and even grief. I blame pop psychology for overgeneralization of the term depression, as well as empty nester. It’s a small point in the big scheme of things, but one that overarches everything of me right now, so I’d like to give it some attention.
First let me say that I feel absurd whining about missing kids who are overall doing well, given that I have too many friends who don’t have the luxury to miss their kids and await hugs upon reunions in this life. That is genuinely heartbreaking, near-unbearable. Understand that I am not taking the good fortune of my kids moving into expansive adult versions of themselves for granted for a second. Second, I say that, although there have been significant and constant changes — Riverdale to Gaithersburg, six different full-time jobs plus many assorted part-time jobs, nine different schools between the two of them, separation and divorce… — for 23 years I have primarily been a Mom, devoted to kid(s) in the day-to-day. My kids are my favorite people and for much of my life, I have defined myself primarily in relation to them. I have attempted to do this without burdening them and without abdicating responsibility over my own self-fulfillment. Still, their moving out represents a seismic shift in my reality.
It’s different within these walls when they’re gone. It’s not just the quiet. Either one or both of them being here asleep and silent still feels worlds different from them both being away. There's an energy to their presence, as well as a delightful continuous sense of anticipation — at any moment, I may hear stirring; a joke may land my way, or a conversation might pop up; I might hear a new song… When they’re gone, it’s mostly space and walls and cats. There’s me and music, that I blast at more random hours now, and all that filled my time and space before they moved — books, musings, writing, guitar, Facebook, TikTok, meditation… It’s not as though they spent that much time with me when they were here, not enough that their absence makes me lonely. It’s not loneliness that’s the challenge, no more so than probably anyone faces as part of the human condition. But after 23 years of sharing their presence, I feel loss. Even within my ever-present gratitude that Coley and Quinn ARE.
Ever since Coley started grade school, I found that I could cry just thinking about him going off to college. I braced myself and was as prepared as I could be, but it still proved more difficult than I expected. Thanksgiving 2024 an in-law said, “Quinn will be going soon too.” I hadn’t much thought about it like that — que the waterworks. (That was embarassing.) Well, Quinn and I jumped many hurdles to make that possible. Thank God Quinn is able to go away and attend classes! They’ve joined clubs and made friends and are doing all the things. I’m ecstatic and proud in a forward thinking sense. In my own little confoundations, I’m struggling with poignant missing and lack of ballast.
I’m sure I often fail to appreciate kind gestures of friends and colleagues. But I can’t imagine forgetting any kindness shown to me in these days. From making me laugh with a joke, to responding to a text, to doing me a favor, or laughing at my joke, to giving me space when I ask, or offering to bear witness, to inviting me to play music — these small tender mercies soften my grief, shore me up.
This feels to be a time of personal crisis in a way that threatens to silence me, since my sorrow seems easily dismissed in the grander scheme of an ideal and fortunate trajectory for my kids. I know a couple of other parents, however, who relate to what I’m going through; more likely exist. So I write too to give words to the weight of this space, words beyond empty nest.
I never expected to face these days single. I don’t begrudge that I am, although when I pictured these weeks from the vantage of years past, I anticipated I’d be sharing this time and would enjoy a greater level of distraction than I experience. As it stands, I’ve spent the last couple of years decentering men. Or, to phrase it in a way I prefer, building stronger self-reliance. While shook, I admit that I’m handling it better than I expected I might. I wondered a week after moving Coley into an apartment, a week before moving Quinn into the dorm, what my life might look like about now. Would it have all been a wash? Had I changed at all from 1999, when I last lived alone? I can’t say that I had the strongest sense of self-preservation back then. I couldn’t fully predict what direction I might turn.
Well, it has not all been a wash. I believe my younger self would be inspired by my self-care, gentleness, and grace, even with a magnificent crash out or two. And as I’ve come to often perceive challenges as opportunities in my life, I accept the chance to embody the wisdom of living in the moment to at times brush past missing, and to treat myself with kindness, while continuously checking myself against burdening those two beautiful, free individuals.
Quinn came home from college for the first time this weekend. It was a gorgeous visit. It gave me hope that this amazing adult relationship that evolves after time, that some of my friends have consoled me will develop, may really be so wonderful as to somewhat balance how sad it is to not have them present in my day-to-day.
I deliberately used the phrase decentering men earlier because, since July, I’ve thought to strive to decenter my children. Feels radical when I’ve garnered my greatest self-satisfaction across the last quarter of a century from feeling like I was being a good Mom. I think it’s best for all of us for me to look elsewhere for my self-satisfaction now. I’m betting this will grow better poetry, music, writing, friendships, and perhaps adventures.
It’s a sad end of an era. But, much hope for brilliant, authentic lives for my children and that my sad won’t be long-lasting pervasive. On to my next Act…
Thank you.