I Am Just Fine

I am fine, thank you. No empty nest blues for me. Not this girl. Got it covered.

Years back when my friends started having babies, I listened disdainfully and dismissively as they recounted their struggles with colic. One baby stiffened and burst into tears at 6:00 PM and didn’t stop crying until 10:00 PM. Another baby screwed up her little face, turned beet red, and kicked and screamed from morning to night. To a mother, the descriptions of colic placed the childhood malady somewhere in the inner circles of Hell.

Ho hum! ‘What’s up with this,’ I thought. ‘Come on! It can’t be that bad.’ What was it with my young friends that a little fussing put them off? ‘Get a grip, Mamacita,’ I murmured under my breath. I cluck, cluck, clucked with each and every colic story. I listened to every detail with an understanding heart and a frozen smile. But underneath that civilized demeanor, I pitied these weak sisters. Clearly, they were out of control.

Fast forward a few years to the birth of my daughter, a smiling, cooing baby who ate and slept on schedule and made so few demands that I actually woke her up early from her every-three-hour naps because she was such a delight. Seven years later, my ball of fire son was born, entering the world after a short, intense labor with what seemed to me great hurry – a hurry that carried him through infancy into childhood. From Day One, he never napped. I fed him and put him in his bassinet. Minutes or hours later – it really didn’t matter – when I went in to check on him, he lay there wide-eyed. He slept for nothing.

Despite the absence of a dependable schedule, things hummed along. From time to time, my son had a good squall, but it passed quickly. My daughter continued on her course as a model citizen. Then October arrived and things turned on a dime. My energetic son became possessed of the Demon Colic. Yes, colic. In a flash, my arrogance, my smugness, my ‘get a grip’ ness went out the window and in that instant I KNEW. As my sweet son’s body stiffened, his face a hitherto unknown shade of maroon, a primal scream – infant-sized – emerging from his depths, I knew what my young friends had been through. They weren’t making it up.

Of course, we weathered colic. It took its course in three nightmarish months and we moved on to other delights and challenges. So one might imagine that I would have learned from colic that there are certain events, milestones, and thresholds that beg to be reported, and by reporting, the reporter gains a level of support from loving friends and family. There are certain times in a woman’s life when the kindness – and, dare I say, experience and expertise -- of others goes a long way. It was those very friends whose babies had tormented them with infant colic who coddled and cajoled me as I ministered to my colicky baby.

Why, then, my smugness in the face of another milestone much later down the road: my youngest child’s departure for college? My empty nest.

To be fair, I think the smugness was collective this time, rather than individual. Once that door closed on the last dorm room, we who were sending children off to their own lives believed that adventures were going to pop. We worshipped at the altar of transformation. We would redecorate rooms, travel to exotic places, forge new careers, join gyms, write books. At last, we had time for ourselves. Like magic, rich experiences would fill in the spaces taken by daily carpools, endless loads of laundry, sports practices, three squares a day (diminishing to two and often one as our children acquired busy schedules).Anything was possible: diets, dalliances, destinations. We had been keeping notes.

Oh, believe me, I was ready for this milestone. I was going to make a seamless transition into my empty nest. Sure, there was that moment when I took my leave after settling my daughter into her dorm for her first year of college. I burst into one of those snorting, snuffling, salivating sobs as I said goodbye to her. I cried from Boston to Philadelphia, and can’t remember what went on from Philly to DC. But that was 1998. I had grown and matured since then. I was ready when my youngest child headed off to college in 2005. I would go straight from all those years of single parenting into my new life. No muss, no fuss.

Never mind that I had been the only parent in their lives and that parenting them was the one thing I had wanted to do most in my life. (Career considerations took a back seat until I finally acknowledged that what I have is not a career but work. Meaningful work.)
My kids and I had been a tight unit for a decade. But, hey, that wouldn’t change. They would be home for visits.

I took pride in an orderly and dignified exit after helping my son unpack in his freshman dorm. No snorting. No snuffling. My daughter and I waved a jolly goodbye and headed home. Oh, yeah, I was going to be fine. No question. I was going to go right on home, unpack my overnight bag, and settle into my new life.

The truth is that as confident as I pretended to be, I had become simply a mother without kids at home. And that confused and sometimes stung. This wasn’t colic. This was forever. The house was too quiet and too tidy. I was eating tuna sandwiches for dinner. And what’s up with doing only one load of laundry a week?

And so began a conversation that I have plied with friends and family since that day. Who am I now? Am I still a parent? A parent with parameters? Should I still ship off the boxes of Emergen-C at the first sign of a cold snap? Do they know how to drive on icy roads? Are they eating properly? It’s still not clear to me who I am now, even as my oldest child has finished graduate school and launched her career and my youngest child will graduate from college next spring. This much I know: I will always be their mother.