There’s a framed photo in our living room that my husband, John Muncie, knows is good for a laugh when we entertain new guests. We no longer live in Montgomery County, where the first question is: “What do you do?” We moved to the gorgeous Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, so now the first query is always: “What brought you here?”
That’s when John pulls out The Photo. The stained glass frame delicately surrounds a young man, his arm wrapped tightly around a middle-aged woman, both with their eyes squeezed nearly shut. An expansive smile, billboarding $6,000 worth of orthodontia, pushes the young man’s cheeks up, his eyes squinting into thin brown lines. The woman’s face is cracked in grief, her lips and cheeks pulled downward by quivering muscles, her eyes dark and watery slits. You can practically feel the baseball in her throat.
That’s me, saying goodbye to my older son, Ben, when we dropped him off at the University of Chicago 41/2 years ago. I’m holding a tissue in my right hand. If you look closely, you can see white knuckles and my fingers locked onto the flimsy material as if it were a lifeline that might keep me afloat until I repeated the separation process three years later with my younger son, Sam.
“Our empty nest,” John offers up the photo as explanation to any new guest. They always laugh. “That’s what brought us here. And she’s still crying.”
My husband—a fellow journalist, so he should know better—has let story trump accuracy. I’m not still crying, at least not like that. I may stand before a few photos of my kids and get misty-eyed, but it’s not the same as being sucker-punched by grief.
“A few photos?” my husband asks with that one-sided eyebrow arch I once found alluring. OK, so there are 68 framed pictures of my kids scattered throughout our house, but that’s down by about a third since we moved into a much smaller place.
And then there’s the wall by the side of our bed that we refer to as “The Shrine.” Thirteen feet of kid memorabilia and photos. A second-grade painting by Sam entitled, “My Family Skiing and Waching X Files,” hangs next to a program from a Barrie School production of Oklahoma! Ben played Jud. Under that, a bright blue pennant from Yale, where Sam is a sophomore, nudges up to a coaster-size pin that reads: “I’m a proud U of Chicago parent.” Nearby are pictures of Ben and Sam in basketball uniforms, Halloween costumes, graduation gowns and juice-stained footies.
That’s where John caught me the other day, wiping away a tear.
“That sounds pretty normal. Weeping before the shrine.” So says novelist Susan Coll, author of Rockville Pike and Acceptance. In the fall, she packed off Max, the last of her three children, to Tulane University. Two days later, the moving truck arrived and she and her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Steve Coll, downsized from a Bethesda colonial to a Cleveland Park semi-detached.
“I wasn’t as focused then on the empty nest as I would have been if we stayed put,” Susan says. “I spent the first month in our new house, almost kind of maniacal. Steve was worried and looked up the definition of clinical mania.”
Mania has its up sides. No moving boxes remain in the Colls’ new Washington, D.C., house, all the rooms are furnished and the pictures are hung. “I was happy in this new phase of life,” she says. “I was really happy, enjoying the rhythm of not having to get up at 6:30.”
But mania also has its downside: “It hit me a month later. I realized how much I missed them,” Susan says. “That began my period of grief. I just felt very sad, because that whole 22-year phase of my life was finished. There were funny ways it would hit me. I’d find myself teary-eyed walking the dog in the morning, seeing mothers getting kids off to school. And Halloween…it was always about accommodating everyone’s costumes, getting everyone out, worrying about where they were, when they came home, all that candy, too much sugar, the dog barking. It always felt like an overwhelming day. To go from that to quiet, I felt very sad. We didn’t even get many trick-or-treaters this year.”
Crying over candy or pictures or the dorm room displays at Target is par for the empty-nest course, it seems. Every parent whose kids have flown the coop has a story to tell. Or to sell. Amazon lists 6,635 “empty-nest” books with titles such as 133 Ways to Avoid Going Cuckoo When the Kids Fly the Nest; Bye, Bye, Birdie…Eve of an Empty Nest; Empty Nest, Empty Life? and my husband’s favorite: Learning to Let Go: When to Say Good-Bye to Your Children.
Much ink has been spilled over this topic. I, alone, am responsible for two empty-nest articles and a soon-to-be written empty-nest novel I’m co-writing with my buddy, Abby Bardi (author of The Book of Fred and “Sin of the Month” columnist for the Takoma Voice). We’re calling it, They’re Just Not That Into You.
Such attention to empty nesters is to be expected. We baby boomers—and our life transitions—have always provided fodder for the media. We’ve been chronicled every step of the way, from New York Times articles about the burgeoning classrooms of the 1950s to TIME Magazine covers of drenched hippies at Woodstock. We’ve been dissected, labeled and relabeled: baby boomers, hippies, yippies, yuppies, buppies, abbies, soccer moms, sandwich generationers. Even our children carry our mark. They’re called “echo boomers” and “boomerangs.” So why should this transition—which I would argue is the most challenging yet, at least for me—not be noticed, heralded and profited from?
In this age of new media, TIME covers are no longer the benchmark of importance; it’s how many hits you get on Google. And “empty nest” gets plenty— 769,000 links to empty-nest everything. There are empty-nest support groups, empty-nest live chats, empty-nest bulletin boards and even an empty-nest quiz on MSNBC.com to determine your stage of “Mother Launch.”
“How did you feel during the first few weeks after your last child left home?” asks the quiz, from Carin Rubenstein’s book, Beyond the Mommy Years. You get four choices: shocked, sad, relieved or happy. I wrote in a fifth: Like my other arm had been cut off. (My first child’s departure took the first arm). Pathetic, I know, but not over the top, at least compared with the moms who post on the empty-nest bulletin boards. “I cannot stop crying lately. I’m not ready to let her go,” wrote Mary2007.
Mary isn’t the only one. I spoke with a number of Bethesda-area empty nesters in various stages of “Parent Launch.” That’s right, I’m widening the sociological phenomenon beyond “Mother Launch.”
Though the empty-nest syndrome (yes, it’s an actual syndrome) usually hits women harder than men, according to Psychology Today, I know one father who still sobs after his post-college kids’ visits.
“I hate being gender-biased,” says my cousin, Randy Jaffe, a Santa Barbara- based family therapist to the stars. “But it’s usually the person more connected, the primary caretaker, who has the most trouble with it; and most of the time, that’s the mom.” Though Russell Lacey, a Kensington single father, isn’t the abovementioned sobbing dad, he did reach for the hankie during orientation at the University of Alabama, where his daughter, Caroline, is a freshman. “I got teary-eyed,” Lacey says. “And she called me a big sap, because I am a big man.”