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Stay Away from the Edge, or How Empty Nest Syndrome Kicked My Butt

Empty nest? Who me? I'm hip, I'm cool, and I'm busy! I never worried, never anticipated the moment until my first sad 'moment' last year when I took my daughter on her college tour. I kept the writer's eye on this by starting my blog, "Emptying the Nest - (http://typepad.com/ciel) When I mentioned the dread my feelings to my women friends, all of them gave me the same line: "You won't even know she's gone! You? You're so busy!" As a result, I figured that empty nest syndrome was for those 'other' moms - the ones that had never had a career, those moms that didn't have a passion for anything other than their children.

So it was quite a shock when the grief came out of left field and hit me hard. It was kind of like taking a left turn with your signal on and the road clear, but out of nowhere, SMACK - your fender, or door, or worse - is shattered. As the date for Simone's departure grew near, I cried. Not once, as I expected, but every day. I cried in bed at night, worrying - would she be warm enough? Lonely? Who will watch out for her? Will she have friends? A boyfriend? Then I cried when I woke up in the morning! Every room brought up things I was sad about - her bedroom for the safe aspect of our home. The kitchen for all the happy, peaceful and fun times we'd spent, and for our little, private routine; when Simone came home from soccer (starving of course!) she would sit at the counter in the kitchen reading a fashion magazine while I put dinner together. Intermittently, we would talk about the day, or, often, not talk. In her senior last year she was baking for a fundraising program "Bake for Lives" and once a week we'd bake cookies, brownies or cupcake s - with Simone meticulously attending to the frosting. Toward the last few weeks it seemed I was crying all the time - in the house, in the car, and especially during phone calls with my mother! As Sharon Olds writes in her poem, "High School Senior," "I say 'college' but I feel as if I cannot tell/the difference between her leaving for/college/and our parting forever."

Busy or not busy, I was grieving. And what I learned was that grief does strange things. Many years of therapy had helped me to come to terms with the loss of my father and the deep abandonment issues that were getting in the way of my relationships - I had trust issues, dependency issues, independence issues, and control issues. About a week before Simone was due to leave I had lunch with two good friends. Nancy had tragically lost her son in a car crash during his second year at Oberlin. The last time I'd seen her was at his memorial service. I was mentally prepared to listen, and be supportive. When the subject turned to our kids, and college (all three of us had kids leaving home) I started crying, almost uncontrollably. And it was Nancy, who said something very astute. With complete composure, she looked me right in the eye: "You know, one loss brings up the other. Your father left, but he didn't come back. Simone's just going to college - she's coming back! " I understood that she was implying that my grief wasn't just about Simone, but I wasn't ready to hear it - I was sure that I had "worked out" all that 'stuff' about my father years before.

The first night after I left Simone at school I had a dream about the day that my father died - forty years ago! The grief in the dream was deep and real. But in the very next scene I was pulling old, dusty curtains away from a tall window. In the morning, the way I interpreted the dream was this: leaving my daughter in that unfamiliar environment wit h all my anxieties (coupled with her own anxieties) had triggered the day that changed me irrevocably years ago.

There are days that change your life, and then there is trauma. And, it is also true that the heart does heal. In that next scene - where I pulled open the dusty old curtains, I felt that the message from my subconscious was: If I can just see what's happening in this moment, a new day is dawning, the curtains are being drawn back, and the window to my life is opening and the sun is pouring in.