I always found, “Empty nest?” a supremely irritating phrase, yet it happened yesterday. Though they’ve both been away from home since they were sixteen, when I got back on Saturday from the two hour round trip to east London delivering Blake to university, Jacobi already a week into his new life at the opposite end of town, this home felt exactly like that. A nest that was empty.
It’s never felt like a nest before; that aspect was hidden from me until this moment. As I crawled across the finish line, shut the front door, put on supper and my pyjamas, I saw two decades of film running before my eyes; dancing in the sitting room, screaming up the stairs, hurling themselves around my bedroom, that sweet smelling goodnight kiss. Eighteen years in a flash of movies; the time Jacobi lost his s**t in the kitchen and threw over all the chairs, the time I thought Blake was deaf and crept up behind them with two saucepan lids, almost throwing them off the sofa. Lego all over the schoolroom and a train track running the length of the ground floor. Creating an owl house in the loft space above the bathroom for Blake because they both needed to get away from each other, and how much Jacobi wanted a slide built from his bedroom window. The growing and laughing and crying and teeth falling out and ankles twisting and stings and bruises and love. The refusal to eat aubergines, courgettes or peppers. The happy chewing of rice and bits from a bowl.
And then they were gone.
I was already over the cooking and chaos and general interruption to what is also my life as much as theirs. I have been world building since pregnant. My children and I have lived alongside each other and I’ve been handing them the reins since they were able to register that there’s a world out there. They’re fully equipped, as equipped as any eighteen year olds can be to stand up without the scaffold of home. But something has ended and I wasn’t expecting to feel it so keenly, yet I do. They are out into the sea, they are swimming in open water and though the mothership knows precisely where they are in a general location way, and mostly how they are in an acute spidey-senses way, to a greater extent than ever before they’re on their own and so am I.
Thank f**k I’ve been world-building. Now I see for parents whose whole life has been dedicated to picking up socks and planning meals how empty it must feel. How the question, what do I do now? must floor them. However attentive or inattentive, wherever we fall on the scale of dedication, for a period of time we give our lives to our children, and then they leave and our life is handed back.
I went to bed with macaroni cheese and Netflix. I gave myself the weekend to feel it. It’s a moment. The end of one chapter and beginning of another. Here we go.
Eleanor
