Reflections on the Empty Nest

This is not one of life’s transitions that sneaks up on you. You see it coming as soon as your youngest child starts high school, almost instantaneously gets her driver’s license, then five seconds later visits colleges, breaks her curfew, packs, and leaves. You might even prepare for it, as I did, by going back to school for a career changing graduate degree and starting down a new path. Yet, it doesn’t seem to matter that you have seen this day coming and figured out how to ease the pain, when the last one flies away, you drop to the ground as if a baseball bat has connected with the back of your head.

And then you stand up and think about what it all means.

One of the weirdest changes happens in the grocery store. My hand hovers over glistening green grapes but no grapes make it to the check out counter. What’s the point? The kid who ate them like candy won’t be home again until they have withered and turned powdery blue in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator.

At lunch recently I asked my friends Susan and Karen, whose children are a few years older than mine, if they still cook when it’s only they and their husbands at home. Susan looked sideways at me, slightly smiling though I couldn’t tell if she was amused or melancholy or both, and said, “Define cook.” Hmm. That’s a tough one since like most words in the English language it appears to have evolved over the last few decades in my house. It used to mean chicken fingers, mac and cheese, pasta with butter, grilled cheese, and the occasional tuna noodle casserole. I weighed too much during that era.

Eventually, it expanded to seared tuna, asparagus risotto, balsamic glazed chicken, beef bourguignon, herbed sautéed shrimp, and for a while everybody was happy. I was reasonably careful with the fats and the oils in those recipes and got to buy new clothes. Then, having daughters, food snapped back to salads with no dressing, Weight Watchers bagels, Kashi Go Lean cereal with no sugar and less taste, and Smart Balance light buttery spread. It wasn’t as much fun and my husband – but not I – got alarmingly thin.

If I have to define what it means to cook, I think it will take me a while to figure it out. The Scarsdale Farmers Market is a wonderful social occasion. I see women whose kids were kindergartners with mine. My dog gets to nose other friendly canines. But my hand still hovers over the selections. What is the right amount of salad greens for two people, especially two who are now free to decide, without worries about finding baby sitters or avoiding unchaperoned house parties, to eat out and eat out again?

The problem with being an empty nester is not just the food; it’s the air around me. The house is too big, too neat, too quiet. Who expects to miss the two a.m. knock on the bedroom door when your child wakes you up to tell you she’s home? My neighbor Debbie tells me to enjoy what I’m missing. Her 23 year old has boomeranged back into the house while she holds down a temp job in a recessionary market. Now Debbie finds herself sitting up at two in the morning, swinging her foot wildly, waiting for her daughter’s car to pull into the driveway. Sorry, Debbie, so far, I don’t enjoy the empty air. It isn’t just that my suburban house seems to require a critical mass of living, breathing, noisy, messy creatures inside to justify itself, it’s that I’ve haven’t been without a child in my life since the day I started dating my husband, who came to the relationship with a living, breathing, noisy, messy teenage son, courtesy of whom I now have three living, breathing, noisy, messy young grandchildren. But what good does that do me right now in all this pristine silence? Peter and his family live in Dallas; Izzy is at Colgate; Nell is at Brown. I’ve walked the dog, emptied the dishwasher, made the bed, and no one is going to disturb the air here until dinnertime.

However disconcerting these changes are, they are nothing compared to the real brain concussion caused by the empty nest: the stunning speed of light with which whole decades of life have shot by, leaving me centuries older than the moms walking their kids to Fox Meadow school, while I’m walking Tommy my cockapoo and trying not to regain weight now that the dieters have left town. I am staggered by how much has come to an end – the anxiety of being a travel soccer parent of a lower end player on the team, the emergency trips to Staples for poster board for the project due tomorrow, the parenting group meetings, the play dates, the carpools, and the proms. I don’t recognize the face that looks back at me when I brush my teeth. I rejoiced in birthdays, holidays, anniversaries, concerts, back to school nights, tennis matches, moving up ceremonies, graduations, camp visiting days, and the removal of casts. But it was so busy, hectic, motion filled, energized and exhausting that I didn’t notice until they all left that I am a lot older than I was the day David and I started dating and my nest filled up.

I first met my husband 29 years ago. I am worried that the next three decades won’t be as busy, meaningful, rewarding, or fun as the last three have been. I am worried that the years will continue to fly by with unsettling, unstoppable speed. Meanwhile, I talked with Izzy five times yesterday as I walked her through the steps of making asparagus risotto in her sorority house kitchen, then explained to Nell how to check her bank balance on the ATM machine, and debated whether she should take Egyptian Art and Archeology pass/fail. David and I have seen two movies in two weeks, which beats any record in our married lives. We’re heading to Texas to watch our nine-year old grandson play in his first season of tackle football. Did his parents not read the statistics about NFL players and dementia? And I’m writing again.

Stacey Brodsky has practiced law, been a stay-at-home mother, and taught middle school English over the course of the 17 years she has lived in Scarsdale with her husband, daughters, and a succession of dogs.

Copyright 2009 Stacey Brodsky