The empty nest

I got this email from my daughter today as she is away from her own traveling 10-year-old for a week:

“It feels so weird to have a person come out of your body who then flies around on planes without you and keeps secrets. It happens so fast. It hurts, but I guess there is no way around that.”

No one ever told me that the empty nest syndrome was so hard. I knew the expression “empty nest,” of course, but I always took it as tongue in cheek, or a socially acceptable cover for the more honest emotion of relief to see the last of your children leave home. I have heard of support groups for grief from loss to death, and loss to divorce. Do they have support groups for grief from loss of children to other cities and states and “most important persons”?

ENS didn’t hit me till the last of my four children left, and then it came on like a bandit. As long as I had one child in the house I was OK. I am ashamed to say I didn’t bother with the earlier defectors when there was still a last Mohican underfoot—I’m paying for that now.

College is a way station breaking the freefall from high school into the shock of the real world. But I thought that was its function only for children, not for parents. The good-byes as they drive off to California or some other far away state that has the major they want or the scholarship they got are an exercise in salubrious self-deception all around: Everyone pretends it isn’t the end. It would be unbearable otherwise, to go from yesterday’s routine “Stop talking on the phone and get up to bed!” to … nothing.

It seems like ingratitude on their part—all those years of meals and school clothes, and then a peck on the cheek and farewell—until you realize it’s just the way it is, and even biblical:

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother …” (Ephesians 5:31, ESV).

I have seen a photo of a mother bird pushing her baby out of a nest so it will learn to fly. Not much sentimentality, that. Or maybe she plays it close to the vest. When it stopped raining, Noah … :

“… sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground. But the dove found no place to set her foot, and she returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took her and brought her into the ark with him. He waiting another seven days, and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark. And the dove came back to him in the evening, and behold, in her mouth was a freshly plucked olive leaf. So Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth. Then he waited another seven days and sent for the dove, and she did not return to him anymore” (Genesis 8:8-12, ESV).

It makes me sad each time I hear that part. But the thing about loving someone is that it always changes you. That is the bargain. No one has ever loved and not been wounded. Do you realize that when Jesus appeared to the disciples after His resurrection, He still had the scars in his hands and heart forever?