Wild Rose Congregational Church, U.C.C. Evergreen, Colorado

by Ann E. Bolson, D. Min.

It is a snowy Easter Saturday in Evergreen. My husband and I are making nest cupcakes alone this year.  You know the ones I mean, white cake with frosting and green coconut.  You place little candy eggs in the middle.  They are quite a tradition in our household.  

We had thought our son would be here this weekend, but the winter weather prohibited the long drive from South Dakota.  I found myself in a bit of a fog in the grocery store yesterday.  And somehow I got home without the little candy eggs.  Alas, would the empty nesters have to make empty nest cupcakes?  I could not bear the thought.  Soon we will trudge out in the snow to find a store with tiny eggs. 

Our nest has been empty for almost six years now.  Our daughter graduated from high school in 1999, and like her brother, went to a warm climate for college and did not often return home.  We did not fault our children for this.  Certainly the world, and freedom, and their friends held more interest for them than the old confines of home.

When we took the oldest off to college in Texas in 1995, we were wrecks.  Being good Scandinavians, we generally swallowed our feelings and thus they worked their way out through our bodies.  My back went out, my husband experienced insomnia.  We had so very much loved participating in our son’s life.  He was a tennis player, a basketball player and a soccer referee.   He was a bright student.  He seemed to symbolize infinite possibility.  We talked about him and cried over him all the way home from Texas.

A friend across the street helped us allow our feelings.  She said that she had burst into tears every time she looked at her daughter Heather’s picture after she left for college.  I had done some grief/celebration work for Tony by patiently putting together a memory album for him before his graduation.  My heart was breaking, but it had to be.

In that my own parents had been too busy to deposit me in college in l969, we made it a point to shop with our kids for school and to go with them to set up their dorm rooms.  This shopping trip was a rite of passage for our kids, taking a cart slowly around Target, selecting bedding and the tools of survival within a prescribed budget.  My heart was aching.  But as a marriage and family therapist, I had often told my clients that our job as parents is to prepare our children for survival in the world.  

In my heart, I cherished those final years with our daughter, the younger child.  Monday nights were special. Stephanie was at ballet and my husband Steve was at racquetball.  I would prepare soup and muffins and retire to the study to write.  My mother died in l998 and it nearly unglued me.  I reflected deeply on her life to try to gain wisdom.  It seemed to me that she had lost her way a bit after my brothers and I left for college.  I’m not sure she ever came to grips with the empty nest.  

I felt that I could commute to Chicago during Stephanie’s senior year in order to attend seminary once more.  It was a type of sabbatical from my teaching and therapy positions.  While there, I took everything out of the basket that was me and looked it over carefully before putting it back in.  It was during that year that Steve and I painfully deconstructed our marriage and reconstructed another.  We took a hard look at how focused we had been on our children.  We came to see that they were the glue which held us together.  The nest was feeling a little shaky.

For people who were quite skilled at conflict avoidance, we did a pretty good job of going deeply into our issues.  We had to forgive ourselves for who we were when we got married.  We had to forgive ourselves for secrets kept and distances built.  We pledged that our goal now would be to support the spiritual growth of self and other.  We vowed to take a close look at everything we used to reconstruct our nest.  Would materialism be our pole star?  Would we hitch our wagon to the star of adventure?  How would we treat each other?  How could we develop new ways to relate to our children?

Steve will be home from his meeting soon.  We will make our way up to Evergreen Drug to buy those little eggs.  We don’t know what they will hatch into, but we like surprises more than we used to.  We trust life more now.  We seem to be destined to be parents, but now the baby birds are the shy dreams of ourselves and others.  We are committed to a life of sane and happy usefulness.

In the last parish I served, there was a man named David who chose to care for his mother in her final years.  David’s father had been a speech teacher at the University of South Dakota. Harold, the father, loved to write poetry.  He wrote a poignant poem about this time of empty nests, and his dear wife added the final stanza after his death in l983.  I offer this poem as a tribute to Harold Jordan, whom I never knew, his wife Evelyn with whom I sat for many hours, and their son David, who is among our dearest friends.  This empty nest syndrome has been happening for many, many generations.