To Fly the Coop

I recall the day I left home as if it were yesterday. Although now that I think about it, that might not be the most reassuring declaration in that, as I age, I sometimes have trouble remembering what I did yesterday.

Anyway, let’s just say I remember the day as well as possible. I was 20 and was headed from Calgary to Edmonton to go to the University of Alberta. I’d completed a couple of years of post-secondary education in Calgary but dreamt of the bright lights and big city, the razzle and dazzle of a metropolis where my life, my true and real life, could begin and catch fire. I wanted action and excitement. I picked Edmonton instead. That day, ready to depart, I stepped into my old beater station wagon I had purchased for a few hundred bucks and filled with my earthly belongings: a few sweaters, two pairs of jeans, various socks and underwear, a winter coat, a squash racket, a pair of soccer cleats and about 600 books. I was parked in the alley by our garage, saying goodbye to my dad, who was standing beside the car. He was stoic and quiet, as always. Told me to drive safely, as always. Slipped me 50 bucks, not as always. My mother was nowhere to be found. It was odd. I mean, I was leaving home for heaven’s sake! Didn’t she even want to say goodbye? I asked my dad if she was going to come out and say goodbye.

“She can’t,” said my dad. “She can’t bear it.”

I looked out of the car to the kitchen window and there she was, framed in her grief, watching her eldest depart. I was the first family member of my generation to go to university and my parents’ first child to leave home. My mom was weeping, her arms crossed over her stomach. I waved goodbye and smiled. She tried to smile back but couldn’t and had left the window frame before I even put the car in gear. I shrugged at Dad and he smiled and shrugged back. It was just Mom, I figured. Mom being emotional. It wasn’t like I was abandoning her or anything. I said I’d be back for Thanksgiving, six weeks down the road. She still had five more kids in the house. I’d presumed I was doing her a favour by lightening the load. Kids leave home. It’s what they do. What’s the big deal?

I get it now.

Our oldest, Jess, moved out a few years ago. That was hard for various reasons, not least because the move was to New York City. It was exciting to visit but a little nerve-wracking to imagine our child living there. Berkeley, California is home for Jess now, which is at least closer and where a person is more likely to get harassed into buying heirloom vegetables than to be mugged. Our younger daughter, Grace, has gone back and forth between Edmonton and Vancouver over the last little while and has now moved back to Vancouver, for good, she says. So now it’s just Cathy and me. After Grace left, I turned to Cathy and said, “Now what are we going to talk about?”

In my mind I went back to that day when I left home. Kids leave. It’s what they do. It’s what they’re supposed to do, namely, abandon their parents who raised them from glutinous blobs of protoplasm into fully functioning human beings, leaving the nest just as their parents are themselves beginning to recede slightly and could really use their help with raking up the damn leaves all over the front la …

Too granular? Sorry. OK, really, it’s not a big deal. Emptying the nest is the natural order. (I will note, for the sake of reality, that adult birds often push their little ones over the nest’s edge to force flight on the ones lucky enough not to end up splattered on the forest floor.) We humans raise our offspring to leave, and if we parents have done our job properly, our children will proceed to forsake us in our hour of greatest … OK, OK. Scratch that, too. But the truth is that having your kids leave home is not all fun and games. To co-opt a business consultant’s phrase, parents have to negotiate the tension between pride and abandonment. With a little bit of relief thrown into the mix. Let’s unpack all this, shall we?

Let’s deal with the pride and relief part first. Cathy and I had, and still have, two children who are young people of considerable intelligence, warmth and integrity. I highly recommend a conversation with either of them should you ever have the chance. We are very proud of the people they have become. But there is a dreadful reality to raising children that you’re not supposed to mention as a parent: it takes a toll on a person. Wait, what? Others have mentioned that? Oh, OK. Well, I’ve never read a parenting book, so I guess that’s why I thought it was just me whispering the truth that shall never be named (except in this column), which is that raising kids is immensely rewarding but it takes a chunk out of you. And we only had two. I can’t even imagine what it was like for my parents. My mother had five preschool children by the time she was 25 years old. You read that right. No wonder I sometimes catch her looking at her numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren while she exhales with undisguised relief. I’d be exhausted, too, Mom.

So, yes, there is pride in seeing your children forge their own path, and yes, it can also come with a bit of relief that perhaps the hard lifting is over. Let’s now move on to the abandonment. And remember, in the eyes of the law, not understanding you are committing a crime does not absolve you of that crime. Ergo, if your children don’t understand that they are utterly and totally throwing their parents under the emotional bus when they leave, that doesn’t mean they are not accountable for the grief they are leaving in their wake.

I suppose it’s fair to say that with most reasonably well-adjusted children, the detachment process starts long before said children technically leave home. I remember saying to Cathy ages ago, probably when Jess was in junior high, that it was clear that we were no longer the sun our child’s life orbited around, but distant moons faintly visible in the night sky. Which is OK. Friends take over at a certain point, as should be the case and as was also the case in my teen years. I remain on excellent terms with my mother (my father died decades ago). I love her and respect her, but in thinking back to those days when I was leaving home, I wasn’t particularly worried about her emotional state the day I left. I just figured she was sad to see me go and would probably get over it by, say, dinnertime.

But I see now that having your kids leave home is not like getting a haircut, a seamless adjustment to having less of something. No, it’s more like having one’s eyesight recalibrate in daily microgradients across years of raising children, so that you come to view the world filtered through their experience and your experience of them. Then, suddenly, those lenses that took 20-odd years to build are snatched away and now you can’t really see the world properly. Refocusing does not and cannot happen immediately. Again, this is not a wrong thing, it’s just how it is. And the opposite would be worse! I don’t want irreparable cataracts (in this analogy, that means kids who never leave home).

Pride, relief and abandonment aside, the bottom line is that you just have to get on with it once they’re gone. It’s not all bad. The house is quiet most days, though the problem with that is that the house is quiet most days. I grew up in a house of two parents, six kids, three bedrooms and two bathrooms. I didn’t have my own bedroom until I left to go to university. The notion that silence could be part of home life is alien to me. Now, some days when I’m working in my home office, the dog will bark at something on the street and it startles me. It’s not the easiest adjustment. Lately, I’ve found myself wandering into one of the bedrooms formerly occupied by a daughter, where I’ll mess up the bed and toss clothes around at random just to fondly recall the good old days. Or I’ll smear toothpaste on the bathroom counter. If I’m feeling particularly nostalgic, I might even go into the kitchen and yell out, “Would it kill you to clean up after yourself?”

There’s no one to yell back now. The only response I get is a puzzled look from the dog. All I hear is an echo. An echo coming back to me in the form of the voice of one of my daughters, saying, It’s OK, Dad. Don’t worry. Everything’s fine. I smile to myself. But then I also hear, And don’t forget to clean up that mess you made in my room before I come back for a visit.