Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Our children fly the coop--again and again

By Dale Bryant

I first heard of "empty-nest syndrome" in a mandatory college course called Marriage and Family Life. It occurred to me that, even though my brother was still at home, my mother might be experiencing early stages of the malady now that I was away at school. The way my textbook described it, she would have begun to think that her useful life was at an end, the rearing of children, after all, being the reason she was put on earth. She was probably staring into space a lot and longing for the pitter-patter of little feet running through the house.

Later, when my son was young, I read about empty-nest syndrome in those women's magazines one reads early on to make sure that no bit of child-rearing wisdom goes unnoticed. I figured I had until my son was 18 before I would be struck with the crippling syndrome.

Actually he was 19. And he was gone for a couple of years. Amazingly, it wasn't as traumatic as I had been led to believe. But then, this being the '90s, he eventually returned, and I got to hear the pitter-patter of not-so-little feet running around my house again. Most of my friends--many of them the parents of my son's friends--have all had similar experiences. We think of it as "revolving door empty-nest syndrome." We no sooner learn to cope with the trauma of a clean, quiet house than our babies come bouncing back.

Now he's gone again. And, once again, we are trying to adjust.

At first, we just sat and listened to the deafening silence. No bass emanating from the spare room and vibrating the house. No TV sounds from behind the door in the hallway. No ringing telephone or answering-machine taking messages behind that door.

To help deal with the emptiness he left behind, we moved the Health Rider from the dining room (where actually, it didn't look half bad tucked behind the dining-room table) into my son's old room. The guest room.

I have a guest room, I thought. It was a giddy sensation. But, of course, it was nothing compared to the pain of empty-nest syndrome.

I have a friend whose daughter is preparing to move out--again. I called her to commisserate. Now that her daughter is leaving, her son, who has come and gone several times, has suggested it might be a good idea for him to move back. In an unguarded moment, she said to him: "Are you crazy!" Her concern, of course, was for him. Independence is important to young men even if their mothers have a hard time letting go of the apron strings.

Actually, while her son sleeps and pays rent elsewhere, he eases the burden of her loneliness by dropping in when she isn't home and helping himself to whatever is in the refrigerator. And for the sake of nostalgia, he leaves his dirty dishes in the sink and the mustard jar and empty tuna can on the drainboard.

Two weeks after my son moved to an apartment, we had overnight company in our new guest room. In the past, when our friend came to visit, we got to blaze a trail through the room, removing seven or eight dirty spoons, half a dozen glasses, smashed soda cans, old cartons of Ben and Jerry's ice cream and crumpled up bags that once held cookies. This time, we had to be content to move the Health Rider so we could unfold the futon. It made us feel lonely and useless.

The other night, friends came for dinner. We recalled when our sons played basketball together in junior high and high school. Their oldest son--they have three, all of whom have left and returned and left again--spent a week at the beach with us when he was 12. That's the son who was home most recently, but he's taken a job out of state and has flown the proverbial coop once again.

We agreed that having our grown children at home was quite nice.

"What I miss the most," his mother said, "is that the leftovers don't disappear any more." This son, even more than the other two, used to wipe out anything he could find in the refrigerator.

"I used to come home from work and look for something I'd saved specifically for dinner that night and find that it had disappeared," she said. "Now that he's gone, there are no surprises in the refrigerator. I miss that."

I reached out, trying to find common ground. "I miss the crumbs scattered around the toaster and the peanut butter residue in the sink," I told her.

My husband chimed in: "I miss the toothpaste in the bathroom sink."

I'm not sure if people realize what we middle-aged parents go through. Empty-nest syndrome is bad enough once. But we go through it time and again. And it never gets easier.

We poured some Dubonnet over ice with a squeeze of lemon. The only time any of us could remember drinking it had been on trips to Paris. Without our children.

"Here's to coping with empty-nest syndrome, again," we said, supportively.

Dale Bryant is the editor of the Los Gatos Weekly-Times