A View From the Nest, Part 3

When we sent our son off to college last fall, one of the big transitions Mike and I faced was learning to think of ourselves as “empty nesters.” We’d always made our family (and, more specifically, our children) the center of our lives, so learning to re-focus our thinking took some effort. We did it, though. We learned to think of our house as a two-person nest with occasional visitors rather than a three- or four-person household.

But parenting, like most things in life, isn’t linear. We talk about our children achieving milestones when they’re babies, and we think of those milestones like the mile markers on the interstate–you pass them once, and then they’re behind you. They appear in a specific, logical order. They’re one of the ways we convince ourselves that everything is as it should be.

People are never that logical, though, and there’s no one way anybody “should” be. The traditional college experience worked very well for our daughter; she moved into a dorm, then became an RA and lived in the dorms for another year, then moved into an apartment off campus with roommates. She changed her major, but she’s mostly stuck with the goals she had in mind for herself when she went to college.

Our son is a different story–but, then, he always has been. He’s the kid with a sense of humor that keeps you laughing, a heart that’s rather astonishing in its generosity, and a general outlook on life that I’ll call “flexible.” By which I mean that his motto is “Whatever.” His first year of college didn’t go as well as we’d hoped, and now he’s decided to move back home for a year, take some classes at our local community college, find a job, and think about what his major should be when and if he transfers, again, to a four-year university.

That’s right. If.

As you can imagine, because Mike and I are professors, we think of higher education as a rather large priority. But one of the things I’ve learned from my year in the empty nest is that both of my children now have lives that are entirely separate from mine. That doesn’t mean I won’t worry about them, or that I won’t offer (sometimes unsolicited) advice. I’m the mom, after all. Worry and advise is what I do.

It does mean, however, that even though we’ll be living under the same roof for a while, I have to remember that my son is not a child anymore. He’s a grown man who will be making his own decisions–some of which I won’t agree with.

He’ll be starting a new school, again, this fall. If he decides to move forward from there, he’ll be starting a new school again this time next year. I’ve stopped thinking about college as a milestone and started thinking about it, instead, as a long stretch of highway with lots of rest stops and exits, some of which look more inviting than others. But I’m not the one in the driver’s seat on his journey, so I’m not the one who gets to choose the route we travel or, for that matter, the destination.

I’ll be honest: watching my son’s life unfold from this perch is not an easy job. It looks that way, I know. People keep telling me “Your work is done! It’s all up to him now.” And while I recognize that this is true in many respects, I also know that it’s never completely accurate.

The nest is never really empty. Even when it appears to be, it still bears the shapes of its former inhabitants: their very absence speaks of their presence. That’s why we refer to bedrooms as if they still belong to the people who haven’t slept there for years. The nest is really just waiting for them to come back, as so many people do–coming home to a place that hasn’t actually been their home for years.

The nest, it seems, is always ready for their return, because it’s meant to be part of the journey–not just its starting point. It was created for a larger purpose right from the start: to be a safe place to land, rest up, and prepare for the next leg of the trip.