The suspicious wads of bedside tissues or horrifying, hardened socks are gone.
For now, I will not be struggling to file a story while a shirtless bassist is relentlessly strumma-strumming his latest, fire riff four inches from my ear.
The nest is achingly empty.
Our youngest started college classes this week and it’s supposed to be an air-punch, fistbump, high-five moment of parenting victory. Two kids in college, thriving. They’re even in the same state, just 45 minutes apart.
But right now, it blows.
“Bereft” is the word that my empty nester, Gen X friends and I keep coming up with.
Who are we when hockey practices and PTA meetings aren’t the true shapers of our schedules?
Are vegetables REALLY that important?
And if we even have dinner, what the fuck are we going to talk about?
Besides having to actually do correctly all the things we janked up and blamed on the kids — we’re the real slobs — there’s the challenge of redefining identity and marriage.
“The divorce rate among younger people has steadily decreased since the 1990s,” said a report by the National Center for Family and Research, “while the rate for those aged 50 and older has more than doubled over the same period.”
Yes, Empty Nest Divorce is a thing. We’re two grackles who endured gruelling, sleepless nights with crying babies, soccer schedules and prom date drama and will now slash each other’s throats over the coffee mug stack on his desk.
“You’re going to finally see that all the shit you were blaming me for was actually done by the children,” the husband said.
Hmm. We shall see.
And there’s the challenge of how much long-distance parenting is kosher. And needed.
My parents got a weekly pay phone call that did not include anything about the classes I was struggling with or the frat houses I puked in. It was a proof-of-life completed below a $2.50 long distance charge.
But I happily accepted a Facetime call from the older son last week for a video consult on whether “this ground beef looks cooked?”
On the younger son’s first night in his dorm, I resisted LoJacking him for hours. In a moment of weakness around midnight, as the internal bleeding began to subside on the heart removal surgery I had just undergone, I opened up my iPhone to seek the comfort of his little facebubble floating over the dorm room on Hemenway Street in Boston, tucked away in the bed I had made for him that day.
The screen showed that facebubble in the Charles River.
“I got invited to a party on the docks, mom,” he explained the next morning. “You said you wouldn’t be checking it all the time.”
Serves me right.
So I went online and bought (only two) tickets to see (what remains of) the Sex Pistols in D.C. later this month. I said yes to every invitation we got. And I’m going to avoid going into their bedrooms for the entire month of September.
(But I can tell you that he’s crossing Boylston Street as I write this.)