The Motherlode
Processing the fact of an empty nest many years later
Last week I tackled a sorting and culling project that I have been putting off for nearly a decade. I ventured into the closet of one of my adult offspring and sliced into the taped-up boxes that they had shipped to their father‘s house sometime after their college graduation. I had relocated to Maine and was in a new relationship, and my former husband‘s new home became the ancestral home, the landing spot.
In the intervening years, there was no urgency to open up those boxes. In a bedroom closet, they were in no one‘s way during the occasional visits of our grown children.
This is the aspect of letting go that is the hardest for me: Being reminded of those long-ago years when we were all just starting out, futures wide open, and then the passage of time, their growing up and moving away, into their own futures, as it should be.
I hoped that taking this step would give me the courage to go through the hundreds of pages of school projects, writing, art, and math from preschool through high school, sitting in plastic bins and portfolios in the basement. Going through all of that is not only about the work itself–because aren’t all our children bright and perfect and brilliant?--but also about loss.
I never really dealt with the meaning, for me, of an empty nest. I avoided it. As they left, I myself flew away. It was all complicated by a deeper past, the life I’d lived before I had ever gotten married and had children. I had begun writing memoir, unearthing the unspoken and unresolved pain and grief of my young life. I flew towards processing that too.
I had general permission to get rid of almost everything. Of course, I could not do that because so many aspects of this shedding process, for me, are multi-phased. I simply cannot unload stuff, unequivocally, in one fell swoop. I did not do “before” and “after” shots, but you can see that there was a lot to go through.
As I neared the stopping point, I was inspired to go across the hall into another bedroom, the landing spot for another grown human, whose things had been mostly cleared out by them years ago. I plucked a few more items from hangers and drawers, ending up with two garbage bags stuffed with clothing, mostly from their high school years. I would drop them off, along with an empty, aged guitar case, at Liberty Thrift in my hometown because I was going to visit my mom there the next day.
Back in the original bedroom, I did set aside things that I thought this now-adult might want to see or hold again in the future. They had a friend in college who designed and sewed the most fantastical articles of clothing! They are works of art! And now there was plenty of room in a dresser and in the much-pared-down closet for these treasures.
Maybe in another year or two or three, more will be disposed of. But for now, the room is much lighter, and I guess I am too.
Great title, Sue. Your empty nest musing about never really confronting it reminded me that I never really had an empty nest until Rob and I retired and moved away. By then, each of our kids (who worked with us) had two children of their own. We flew the coop rather than them. So I got my empty nest at 68, about time.