If you’ve been reading my column for awhile now, you’ll know my empty nest journey has gone something like this:
My heart is breaking.
Ok, maybe it’s not so bad.
Oh, Joe, that’s right, I like you.
And our new phase: Hmmm. What exactly are we supposed to do now?
When your kids are young, you never, ever wonder what you should do. You already know, because there’s so much that HAS to get done right away. Drive someone to practice. Buy a gift for the birthday party this weekend. Sign up for sports. Sign up for dance classes. Fill out school forms. Make sure there’s food in the house (or money on the school account) for lunches. And keep an eye out that everyone is doing ok, happy even. The to-do list never ends.
Until, one day, it ends.
Suddenly the days you once wished for – “Can you imagine a Saturday where we don’t have soccer all day?” – arrive in full force. But they somehow don’t seem as good as you imagined. Wait, that’s not entirely true. It is pretty awesome to not set the alarm for a school bus or a weekend tournament. And it is very nice to be able to go out spur of the moment. Like, really spur of the moment – you just say, “Hey, I know it’s Tuesday at 5, but let’s drive down the Shore,” and next thing you know you’re eating funnel cake.
That’s all really, really nice. And it makes for many fun, happy days.
But then there are the days when it seems like time is endless and your house is no longer overflowing with life. Life is still there, but the quiet is powerful.
Those are the times when I ask myself what I’m supposed to be doing. When you spend decades checking off a to-do list for three other people, what do you do when they start creating their own list and handle the checking-off themselves? And most times you don’t even know what’s on the list.
When my youngest Marirose left for college and we became full-on empty nesters, I packed our schedule so Joe and I didn’t think a lot about what had happened. We went to a concert on Tuesday, had friends over for takeout on Wednesday and went away for the weekend on Friday. I did this for a few weeks but of course, that isn’t a realistic schedule.
Then we had days, sometimes weeks, where there were no plans. Nothing to check off on a list. Sure, we went to dinner or caught a movie but that urgent feeling of having to do something for someone else was gone.
So the question we asked ourselves was: What do we do now?
The answer was slow to come, but I think we figured it out.
The good news is I like Joe, and it seems he likes me. So we can plan and go and do and laugh and participate and meet people and see places – all the things we enjoy doing. We get to fill the to-do list with our activities. It doesn’t seem natural right now, but I’m guessing it will over time.
I’m writing this column as I sit next to Joe on a flight back from London. He was there on business, and we decided, pretty spur of the moment, that I would meet him there.
I’m not really sure who the two people were who took that trip, because not long ago they had been somewhat stuck wondering where their kids had gone and how the time with them had rushed by so quickly.
But now they’re starting to think the answer to the question that keeps popping up about what they should do is rather simple: Whatever we want.
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