The Empty Nest is Inevitable

The empty nest is inevitable. It's probably a good thing. Maybe a God thing. Pity the adult child who never leaves home. Pity the parents. Unless, of course, the parent needs that child as a caretaker. My sister, Cheryl, takes care of my mother and lives with her. Cheryl spent many years not living with her. That's the way it should be. Mom and Dad emptied their nest and lived another generation. Now it's my turn to let go. With four daughters (D's) from 27 to 18, I should be good at this, but it's not getting any easier. Last week, D-4 played her final regular season high school soccer game. Coming up, we've got the Sports Banquet, Prom, Senior Sunday and Graduation. Concerning endings, we're just getting warmed up. I'm all for their leaving. I'm eager to find out what road they'll each take next, and what detour they'll, each revealing their need, their concern, their passion or someone else's. I have no doubt they'll do greater things than we ever dreamed and probably face greater challenges than we imagined possible. But why must they go so far away? People ask me this and I can't answer them. The simplest answer is "it's what their mother and I each did." Come to think of it, that's what my mother and father and Jeanette's mother and father did. Off and on, Jeanette and I put our roots down in New England and, over time, we imagined growing old there. There was balance where we made our Yankee homestead. It was a six-hour drive to one family and a six-hour flight to the other. I was happy when D-1 and D-2 decided to attend college at our alma mater, O Dear Christian College, albeit 2000 miles away. D-3, never to be outdistanced by her older sisters, chose a 3000-mile college commute with a drop-dead ocean view. Soon after, D-1 and D-2 became Texans. So with D-4-and-final's choice around the corner, I took a job in the middle of nowhere except a day's drive of everyone. We've had about a year now, to enjoy this arrangement and -- would you believe it? - (you know where I'm headed), our collective offspring waste no time springing off into new and distant directions. In the last six months, D-3's managed to sandwich a semester and a half between vacations in Hawaii and Cancun. Last month, D-2 packed her bags (and Brady's, too), to recapture the innocence of her cold-country childhood and help Brady take his best shot at a northern exposure. And now D-4-and-final's made up her college-bound mind. In less than six months she'll cross back over the Mississippi to become a first-year Lipscomb Lady Bison student-athlete majoring in Nursing. D-1's coccooning in the Big D with her own Big D, qualifying them to be the new "close ones," yet breaking ground for a new home of their own in the very near future. What can I say, but, I'm real proud of my kids and the unique ways they're coming into their own. Like death, the empty nest is inevitable. And a good thing. Because it makes new life possible. New stories. For both parents and their children. New friends. New journeys. New destinations. New worlds and new ways of seeing the world. New problems to apply proven solutions and new challenges that prove the limitations of those solutions. New questions to answer with conventional wisdom and new answers born on the battlefield of worn-out ways. The empty nest speaks to the life that it once contained; to the nurture and development it witnessed; to the protection it made possible and the warmth it delivered. A nest is a shell destined to obsolescence. But the presence of emptied nests everywhere signals countless creatures in flight, logging millions of miles to distant destinations. Fortunately, the good ones always book round-trip travel and go to great lengths to make their way home from time to time. Like empty tombs, empty nests recall great times and great loves while they point to even greater life and love being spread far and wide.