Empty Nester Blues

Wittily and wisely, Susan Percy conveys the tender ambivalence of a rite of passage.

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Barely two hours after completing a 1,300-mile roundtrip to deposit one 18-year-old female and several hundred pounds of clothing and electronic equipment in a fourth-floor dormitory room on a campus in our nation’s capital, I found myself standing in an oddly sterile front bedroom amid stacks of CDs and sweaters that didn’t make the college cut, staring at walls newly free of Dave Matthews posters. The quiet was deafening. But I could get used to it, and I would. I had a plan.

Let others wallow in post-college-delivery depression. I was over it. Well, yes, I cried from the Beltway to somewhere south of Richmond, where I ran out of fast-food napkins. But it was time for me to move on, just as my daughter had.

I would start by creating some semblance of physical order in a space lately marked by clutter and bustle—the joys of impending adventure and the fears of looming farewells playing out as worry over what to pack and what to leave. Surely emotional order could not be far behind.

So I jumped in with both feet. I vacuumed, I dusted, I scoured. I picked up, I sorted out, I straightened up. I carted the remains of a junior high project (“The Effect of Colored Lights on the Growth Rate of Houseplants”—results inconclusive, in case you were wondering) down to the basement and stashed two years of J. Crew catalogs under the bed.

It worked. The room looked splendid, everything neat and tidy: bedcovers fluffed, colorful accent pillows rescued from the floor to rest jauntily on the bed with Elmo and Pooh, Paideia yearbook on the nightstand. A Kodak moment. A fantasy room for a fantasy daughter.

At precisely the moment I was admiring my handiwork, Willy the cat walked in, sniffed around, bit me on the ankle, and exited the room in a huff.

He was right, of course. He didn’t want a fantasy owner any more than I wanted a fantasy kid. We were both lonesome for the real thing. It would take more than elbow grease and a stiff upper lip to banish the Empty Nester Blues.

Truthfully, the phrase “empty nest” has always sounded falsely, even pathetically, hearty to me. A cute name for a bleak existence in which two middle-aged people spend their evenings eating Lean Cuisines (“No reason to cook, just the two of us”) and wondering if it’s time to start calling each other “Mother” and “Father,” buy matching L.L. Bean outfits, and hit the road in an RV. All too awful to contemplate.

It’s not that you don’t see it coming, this sudden void that confronts you. You do, of course. There’s simply not anything you can do to slow it down. When it hits, it’s like having someone pull a plug and shut off the energy machine that has kept your household humming. The stillness can make you crazy. It isn’t even that it’s so terrible, but that it is so different, so abrupt. It calls for a major adjustment and a grim determination to look on the plus side.

So, the first weekend she was gone we rediscovered Sunday brunch, the pleasures of Eggs Florentine and coffee someone else has gotten up to make, good conversation with friends in lieu of solitary mumblings over the Arts and Leisure section.

We began to notice there were no wet towels on the bathroom floor, no stockpiled cereal bowls on the floor next to her bed. Quarts of Starbucks’ Java Chip ice cream sometimes stayed in the freezer for days. At night, we could go to sleep, rather than lying half-awake waiting for the sound of a car pulling into the driveway, a screen door slamming. The cleaning service even knocks $5 off the regular price when there is no kid in residence.

Okay, the quiet takes some getting used to. After years of wondering if the phone will ever stop ringing, you find that it does. My husband has even stopped snarling at the dinnertime telemarketers who call—it’s reassuring to know that the phone is still in working order.

Underlying all this is an odd sort of frustration. There she is, doing exactly what she should be doing—maybe on less sleep and more caffeine than we might prescribe—but doing it pretty well, nonetheless. So why aren’t we deliriously happy? Well, it is a passage, the end of an era, a crossing over. Ready or not, the super-involved, meter-always-running parenting days are over.

Congratulations, you can stay late at the office, stop by the gym, read the complete works of James Joyce, sign up for a photography class, and volunteer anywhere you want to. The situation is an ironic reminder of the sheer impossibility of getting time and opportunity in sync. You find yourself marveling at how recently, during the Car Pool Years, you longed for one evening when you didn’t have to do anything. Now you suddenly have seven a week.

For years, my personal wish list was topped by the fantasy that I could just drive straight home from the office. No detours to pick someone up, no grocery store runs, no racing-the-clock searches for an art supply store that stocked the blue poster board needed for the next day’s classroom deadline, no Girl Scout meeting or soccer practice or basketball practice to transport bodies to or from.

Consider this a reminder to be careful what you wish for…

Once your offspring has left home, you are, of course, still needed in your parent capacity, but in a different way. Everybody has a new part to learn, and hardly anybody gets it right the first time.

Case in point: There was a moment during Parents’ Weekend of my daughter’s freshman year when I was with her in her dorm room while her dad waited in the lobby. As we started to leave, I heard myself say, “You’d better put on a coat, it’s cold.” We both laughed, and she went, coatless, to the lobby, where her father greeted her with, “You ought to go back up and get a jacket. It’s getting cold.”

Coats turn out to be fairly easy. It’s the other stuff that’s hard, like trying to help a distant kid through a rough time. By the time you get the letter or retrieve the email that details her problem or frustration, she’s resolved it—which, of course, is just about the way it should be.

She called us the first week she was away to say she was homesick and the second week to say she had just seen the President. Those kinds of lows and highs pretty much defined the first few weeks, but the real message that came through was that she was working things out, taking care of business.

Even if out of sight, out of mind doesn’t apply to the absent kid, it actually works for some of the day-to-day operational details: Did she eat breakfast, wear her gloves, get enough sleep? Probably not. Would we approve of her college associates, the hours she keeps? Doubtful, but out of our hands.

A friend told me a story of driving her daughter to a college in the Midwest and hearing the residence adviser joke about a mother who had actually spent a couple of nights on a lumpy green sofa in the student lounge, unable to let go. My friend had a good laugh over that. Yet once she left her daughter and was facing a 700-mile drive, she couldn’t get under way. She stopped for a leisurely lunch in town, poked around the shopping district, and picked up some brochures on area tourist sites before reminding herself to abandon her own green sofa and head home.

It has been helpful for me to carry around that sofa image and make myself visualize it if I am tempted to advance when I should retreat, pick up the phone when I should wait for it to ring, offer advice when I should keep my own counsel.

But, meanwhile, back at the ranch, there’s work—always—lots of it, there’s the rest of the family, friends, the other things that you finally do get around to. Brunch menus notwithstanding, you don’t actually return full-tilt to your pre-kid existence. Who has the stamina for that? But you do forge a new one.

And just about the time you get used to your reinvented existence, here comes Thanksgiving or Christmas or spring break or summer vacation, and it’s time to resume your role as perennial dispenser of useless advice (“Don’t stay too late,” “You ought to get that rear tire checked”).

So the adjustment continues. Well into her second year away, there are no Lean Cuisines in the freezer, but we’ve developed a taste for takeout. We’ve actually gone on a couple of weekend trips, but not in an RV. And we still call each other by our given names. The cleaning frenzy, for me, was a one-shot deal, and I’ve made peace with the cat. I have a copy of Dubliners on my bedside table, but no L.L. Bean catalog. You can actually reach me on the telephone at home. Life more or less goes on.

But it’s still way too quiet.

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