Empty Next: What will you do with all that you?

My empty next - writing full time

When our four children were under eight years old, I remember asking my husband not for a spa day or trip for my birthday, but a weekend alone in the house. What would I do with a weekend alone in the house, he wanted to know? 

"I'll spend two days in my own company, in my usual surroundings and eat Triscuits and cheddar slices for dinner," I said. 

Sixteen years later, our youngest left home and there I was, facing endless days in my own company, in my usual surroundings. And was I still as thrilled to have the house to myself? 

Yes. I was. 

However, a new challenge was before me that I hadn't expected, and it was this: to put myself at the center of my awareness where my kids used to be. 

I didn't need to embrace my freedom or go back to school, or volunteer. I needed to learn how to come first again, which felt like wearing shoes on the wrong feet. 

If you're going through this, or think you will, let me offer some pointers for getting used to this quirky twig of the empty nest. 

Starting now, journal and keep track of how you're changing. 

Before our youngest graduated, I started journaling every day; putting my feelings about the events that were changing me on the page where I could see them. The following year, when our house was empty, the proof of how I coped with ups and downs was right there.

When you've filled your awareness with other people for possibly decades, that awareness needs to go someplace when they leave. Be the someplace. Write to yourself. 

Empty nest is only one of the issues. The other is about empty "next." 

I remember leaning in the doorway of the first empty bedroom feeling a need to do something. If your empty nest is a couple of years or less from now, I can tell you, the "something" must  be planned in advance. It shouldn't be a thing to help you pass time, but a thing you would do now if you had time.  

I went to the local Boys and Girls Club and signed up to help kids write their life stories. It changed my life to blend my affection for teens with a passion for writing. It was hard to make time for it while my son was in the nest. But it was waiting for me when I needed the "next." 

The ghost in the house. 

When our kids were at home, I loved 5:00 in the afternoon. It was when I settled into the kitchen for cooking and conversation and where I felt most connected to everyone. When the house was empty, the old rhythms and the new ones collided in the kitchen at 5:00.  

When the kids leave, they leave that behind – a feel and rhythm in the house that has probably taken years to evolve. This phantom "feel" to things  can sting at first, but it won't last forever.

It won't be just a change in what you do and who you see that will move you back to the center. It will be the new feel and rhythm that grows around you if you let it. 

 Everything up or down, is just right now. 

After I'd become pretty good at my new me-in-the-middle life, a mid-November day sent me into a sudden, near-panic at the thought of November days that would feel nothing like the old ones.The ghost was back and with it came the earlier feelings of disorientation.  

And then they went. 

I helped myself by remembering a thing I had said so often to our kids:

Everything up or down, is just right now. No level of intense emotion, happy or sad can be sustained forever, unless you're a chipmunk. 

What you expect, you'll make true. 

Notice the relationship between your expectations and what you experience. I did not imagine I would be lonely and I wasn't. I did not fear I'd wander, but planned to meander mindfully.  More than I noticed quiet, I felt peace. 

Think hard about what you expect from a day, because with amazing consistency you'll see things happen as you envision them, up or down. 

Your work on-site is done now. But you are not through parenting. 

My children had my love, all the patience I was capable of, and the best of my intuition and intelligence as they grew. As adults, our relationships are true, and deep. 

I detect, in the expressions of some in my parent communities, their sense that an uncertain time is coming, like distant rain; something that might be overwhelming and cold, even dark. 

I say, get your rain coat and umbrella, and keep them handy.  The rain may come, as it should, but so will the sun shine, and growing things will be grateful. 

You included.  

A version of this post was originally published at grownandflown.com

After August

A while back, our two oldest children left for college one week apart. 

Jarring, yes. And yet, I remember thinking, I'm not upset enough.  It reminded me of when I was child and wanted to cry at a funeral because everyone else was.

July rolled into August. Suitcases filled, rooms emptied of posters and books and CDs, and while I found myself looking longer and harder at my children, I was still not weepy. Nor was I second-hand weepy around the mothers who couldn't get through a discussion about goodbye without tearing up.

I was even a tiny bit more cheerful as September came into view.  No more details, no more shopping. No more saying, "Did you," at the start of every sentence.

One brilliant green and yellow morning, I listened to the last movement of Beethoven's sixth, a piece my violist-daughter and I adore, and one I'd watched her perform the previous summer. I thought about that lilt in the beginning, the part she really loved, and wondered, where did it actually begin? I went to her room to ask her, and got halfway. In a week, I would not be able to do this.

I still remember my face getting cold, and a feeling of being hollow. And did I cry hard enough to make my best friend come over in her pajamas? Yes, I did.

As new parents write of lost identity when babies come, veteran parents write often of disorientation when babies go. What of the next relationship we ask ourselves, when we aren't yet those people we will be for each other?

For some, as drop off day looms, there is a wish to extend moments that are "special," and mixed feelings over unrealized joys, sadness over endless "lasts."There may be halting in the hallway, there may be cold faces. 

But most likely, there will be thoughts of who will we be instead of us?

I have come to understand the answer to this, and it isn't something I would have understood at all had someone tried to explain it before August.

It is this: my relationships with our four adult children, are more rewarding today than at any other time  because today, they demand more of me as a person than a parent. 

They are different people, but share a tolerant, kind view of the world which they require of those they intend to trust. I've learned from them, how it feels to want to be wrong, to step out of old thinking. I have started more than one conversation with, "Help me change my attitude about something."

I've never found it so easy to laugh at myself.

It wasn't like this when they were in high school and living at home. It was like this after August, when they began the work of becoming their adult selves. 

Until recently our daughter lived in Cleveland,  650 miles away from us. There, she directed a program which offered violin lessons to inner city children. Small children. Children who arrived tired and cranky and were more interested in my daughter's earrings than the piece upon which she tried to focus their little attention spans. 

She took me to tour the facility. When she left to take a call her boss resumed the tour, explaining the programs they offered and the value my daughter has brought to them. 

"We love her," said this man who has only known her as an adult, a kind, talented, professional woman. "She's a natural."

Later , we shopped for groceries and prepared dinner and talked in her kitchen about things we thought about, worried over, looked forward to, dreamed about. We had as much fun as two grown women can have when one is no longer – nor yet – dependent on the other. Today, we are more alike than we aren't, despite the twenty-plus years between us.  We share a mother-daughter relationship, but have adult lives in common.

My August hallway question is long behind me but I have learned this: children leave, and they travel as far as they must to become their individuated selves. But if we give each other that distance, don't try to close it, a very good thing can happen, next.

Whether they move down the street or text us from their living rooms across the country, they will reach out again. It will be for answers or approval, but as people with experiences to share, in need of comparison, in need of commonality.

The fall is coming. Parents will miss their college freshmen perhaps more than they imagined. I say, let the memories come. And as you remember the times you'll always cherish, also remember the times you wouldn't revisit for anything.

Above all, be joyous about the future, as love grows right along with you and connects you, long after August has come and gone. 



This piece has been updated. It originally appeared at Grownandflown.com in August, 2015.

Sometimes, life is a bully on the bus.

Here is a brave person who is
saying "hi" to her new forest.

When I was twelve, I shared a daily bus ride to junior high school with my friends, the other twelve-year-olds.  We all seemed to be doing life pretty well until we came to Marcia's stop. 

You could see from her expression, if Marcia, who was pretty, mean, moody and inexplicably popular, was out to tank someone's day, or not. 

You didn't want her to make eye contact with you. You didn't want her to ignore you. Her weapon of choice was random silent treatment. 

And so, did I, as well as the others, do everything we could to buoy Marcia's spirits, make her feel good about herself, laugh at her jokes, all in hopes of not being picked on, or off? Yes, I and we did.

On the list of things that can make life tough for a pre-teen, being frozen out for absolutely no reason by the popular kid is 1 through 3: Friend doesn't like you. Friends of friend don't like you. You don't like you. 

You can turn on yourself when there's a Marcia in your life, convinced you did something to deserve her wrath when of course, you've done nothing but show up in the same place you show up in every day.

Had my mother explained that, I would have said something like, "I really hate American Chop Suey. Why do you keep making it?" because to a twelve-year-old in a world that hinges on a daily bus ride, that kind of exchange with another innocent makes sense.   

And, sometimes life is a Marcia.

Life last week was such a Marcia, I went to my therapist for a touch-up.

Without going into detail, it was a stew of medical scares and waiting and tests and more waiting and results and bullets dodged, followed by a massive computer glitch, and followed next by an incidence of blurry vision which actually seemed symbolic. I was, literally, too stressed to see straight.

Everything turned out okay, or will. But for three or four days, it seemed like everyone I know, and I to a lesser extent, had made contact with Marcia-life.

I am nice to strangers, I love my beings and tell them so. I state my needs, I think about what other people are facing, and send them cards. I'm patient with our dog who is a pinball, and I treat the cat like there is only one like him in the world, which is true.

I do it in part because it's what nice people do. But I know I do it also to stay on life's good side, because the connection between these behaviors and a life that has smiled on me seems pretty apparent in some cause and effect corner of my brain.  

I kind of, sort of, think life should take that into consideration when it is preparing to be Marcia and needs a target.   

So, I looked skyward one morning last-week and asked my God in a nice way, WTF?

My God said, "Remember the album?"

Marcia had gone to my house when I wasn't home, lied her way in, and taken an album that my brother had let me borrow only after I promised to introduce him to a girl he liked, and probably offered a security deposit.

I knew where Marcia hung out, and I went there.

The first thing that happens when life is a Marcia – a job loss, a serious illness, a death, a divorce  – is that nothing looks like it used to for a while. It is mystifying, disorienting, and frightening to look around at all your stuff, all your people and habits and all that you're used to and feel like you don't actually understand this forest after all.  

You only know you still have a choice in how you'll recalculate.

When I caught up with Marcia she was holding court in a parking lot near the Dairy Queen. I walked straight over to her.

I said, "Give it back."

The conversation around us stopped.

She said some bad words, I said some bad words, she shoved the album into my hand and yelled more bad words at my back as I walked away.

I remember having a feeling I've had only a handful of times since, and it was of knowing  that my whole world was going to be one different forest in the morning. And that I would need a map. And that I would draw one.

It was a relief.

I lost my friends and replaced them with better ones.

None of them were Marcias.

Last week presented several views of a different forest to me. But today, I'm remembering that if I have less control over how Marcia behaves, I have the fortitude and strength to be mightier than she thinks I am.

I think most of us are blessed not to be tested, or scared. Life is how we hope it will be, probably, for the most part.

But I like to think that most of us will know what to do, if we're ever forced to show ourselves in a Dairy Queen parking lot.

We will be mighty. 

Don't forget that.