Nests

Yesterday, we helped our youngest child move in to her freshman dorm. This ended a streak of nearly thirty-five years of having at least one child living at home. (But that can’t be possible, Lou, I’m sure you’re saying, you don’t look a day over forty . . .) I’m still registering what this means. I understand it intellectually — your kids get to a certain age, and they start their adult lives; the math is simple. But there’s some amount of recalibration required. Some version of this has happened as each of our children have gone off to college, but this is the first time when it hasn’t come amid getting other kids ready for the new academic year (another streak that ended in June was that of thirty consecutive years where we had a child in our local school system).

The term thrown around to describe those like my wife and me is “empty-nester.” People use it with a variety of intonations that mean anything from, “How terrible for you — all your children are gone” to “I guess you’ll find out now if you and your spouse still like each other” to “How long will you wait before you turn her bedroom into a yoga studio?” To address these in reverse order, not her bedroom, I like my wife an awful lot (I also love her an awful lot, but that’s a different thing), and they aren’t gone.

When my first child went off to college, I stressed over it for much of the eighteen months before it happened. The only benefit of all that stressing was that it inspired my novel Blue, which has absolutely nothing to do with a kid going off to college because no one would want to read a novel about that. From a sizeable distance, I’ve come to discover that, if the relationship is there in the first place, your kids don’t leave; they just live somewhere else. Also, college is one long transition from the child-at-home stage to the child-somewhere-else stage. You get years to adjust, and what you adjust to can be quite wonderful. Don’t ask me about my grandson (you have a grandson at forty, Lou?) unless you are prepared for a long stream of gushing.

And then there’s the whole thing about “nests.” I think one resides in many nests, at least if you’re lucky. First, there’s the nest of immediate family. That particular nest has been growing for us, and such growth would not have been possible (or it would have at least been a bit awkward) if not for those who “left.” Then, there’s the nest of vicinity. We’ve been living in the same home for more than a quarter century, and in that time, we’ve developed meaningful friendships, a true affinity for the sensibility of the environs — everything from the cultural sophistication to the leaf-peeping to the world-class pizza — and a true sense of belonging in this place.

And there’s the nest of community. My friend and colleague John Adcox and I both prize aspects of “found family” in the novels we choose. I think there’s a reason why found family is a common trait among so many of the most popular stories of all time. There’s something aspirational to it, but there’s also something familiar. Those of us lucky enough to have found kinship among those with shared passions or simply those whose personalities mesh seamlessly with ours know how supportive, invigorating, and soul-sustaining such a family can be.

So, if one is fortunate, one’s nest is never truly empty. Does that mean that one doesn’t feel it when someone close to you moves on to the next phase of their lives? Don’t be silly. But it does mean that one needs not see it as an ending.