The nest was empty—for about 20 minutes
Dusk at the neighbourhood supermarket. Running in for a few essentials, I meet several women with whom I’ve been comparing notes about children for years. They — we — have morphed from young frazzled mothers in jeans to sophisticated career women in clothes without stains. Women who clearly have other things on our minds than the tribulations of elementary school or the traumatic teen years. Not too long ago we congratulated each other as our kids headed off to university. And of course we merrily gave each other the thumbs-up during the empty nest phase. You know, the phase that lasted for about 20 minutes? Now, it seems, we all seem to have the same two words on our lips: “They’re ba-a-ck!”
Statistics now confirm what we can verify by one rueful glance at the boxes in our basements: More than half of today’s university graduates head home at least for a while, either to ponder postgrad studies or to figure out how to get started in their chosen careers.
Many of us assumed that because we left home in our late teens (or early twenties at the latest), our kids would do the same. I left at 19 to rent a small funky room in a houseful of strangers, and I have fervently believed ever since that you can’t achieve adult liftoff while eating breakfast daily with Mom and Dad.
Taking the serenity out of the boomer years
An entire culture apparently believes this along with me, which is why we have comic movies like Failure to Launch, ad campaigns that tell you not to feed your kids cheese if you want them to leave home, and hand-wringing media commentators (including, at times, even me) whining that the biggest threat to the serenity of today’s middle-aged boomer is our slacker offspring down in the basement, laconically polishing their resumés, and eating us out of house and home.
But maybe it’s not so bad. After all, most of those women at the supermarket are not screaming “they’re ba-a-ck!” in an Edvard Munch tortured kind of way. Instead, they seem calm and reasonably comfortable, if not exactly thrilled, with the sobering fact that whatever they once envisaged as “the afterlife” of motherhood has now been transformed into something else entirely. Could it be that some boomer parents actually enjoy having their adult offspring around?
Take my friends Ellen and Allan. She’s a teacher, he’s a consultant, and last winter they had two university grads underfoot — their daughter, Alyssa, 26 who is now in second-year medical school, and their son, David, 23, a recent engineering grad. Far from feeling beleaguered, Ellen and Allan — gasp — admitted they actually liked sharing their Toronto house with their grown children. For one thing, they found it interesting to see the kids sprout their professional wings; for another, they thrived on the heightened level of activity. I got the feeling that the empty nest days were a little too quiet for them.
