Too Quiet

Son #2 was home for the weekend, and son #1 was around the house on both Friday and Sunday.  There was commotion and conversation.  There was clutter and noise.  Between the NFL draft and the NBA playoffs, the television was on almost constantly.  And now the house is quiet, too quiet.  Usually, I'm the kind of person who enjoys silence and solitude. However, after my kids have been home then leave again, the house feels big and empty.  I have trouble settling back into the stillness.  It's the end of the semester, and I have a mountain of work to do, so when I get home this afternoon, I'll probably be able to step back into my new life and appreciate the silence.  But for now, I'm missing my kids.

Just Visiting

I went to college in the town where I grew up.  For five of the first six semesters, I lived at home to save money.  Then during the summer before my senior year, I married my college sweetheart.  We rented a little apartment just up the street from my parents’ house, and my new husband found work and patiently waited for me to complete my senior year.  A few months after graduation, we moved to New Hampshire.  From then on, whenever we came back home, we were just visiting.  My parents’ home was no longer my home.   I didn’t think too much about it at the time, but now that the shoe is on the other foot, I’ve been thinking about it a lot, especially with summer approaching.  As those of you with college-age kids know, summer means you get your kids back for a while.  But for the first time ever, we won’t have a full house this summer; in fact, we’ll be down to just one sweet baby bird.  After college, my oldest son moved back home temporarily.  So we got to have him around for a couple of extra summers.  But last August he moved to an apartment.  Although he lives nearby and often stops by for dinner, it’s not the same.  He doesn’t live here anymore; when he stops by, he’s just visiting.  My second son graduated from college last May.  He came back here after graduation and spent the summer lifeguarding.  He lived in an apartment down the street with his friends, but he was in and out of the house all summer long, especially at dinnertime!  Last fall he moved back to Rochester, but he’s no longer a college boy.  He has a real job now and rents a house with some friends.  And this year when the semester ends, he won't be coming home for the summer.  When he comes home, as he did this weekend, he still spreads his stuff out all over his old room and naps on the living room couch, but it’s slowly dawning on me that his real life and his real home are somewhere else.  I know in my head this is the way it is supposed to be, but I’m having trouble convincing my heart.  All I can do is the same thing my parents did: tell my grown-up kids they are missed and loved and make our home a place they like to visit.

Recipes

I know you can now find just about any recipe you want on the internet; as a matter of fact, I get plenty of recipes there myself. So most of my newer recipes are printed from websites or emails and stored neatly in a three-ring binder.  But the recipes I use the most are the ones stuffed into the recipe box I got when we were first married.  My oldest recipes are written on the cards that came with the box, and I’ve been pulling them out and making them for nearly thirty years.  Other recipes are written on plain white index cards in my mom’s neat printing and my mother-in-law’s distinctive cursive.  I also have recipes from my sister and brother, from my sisters-in-law, from aunts and uncles, and from old friends.  Many are named for the person I got the recipe from: Martha's Magnificent Mustard, Sal's Hot Chicken Salad, Cathy's Spinach Balls.  I love my recipe box both for the recipes and the history it holds.  Two Christmases ago, I bought three red recipe binders for my soon-to-be-moving-out-on-their-own kids.  One of my fondest memories of that Christmas season was listening to the three of them going through my box of recipes, choosing the ones they wanted in their binders.  My plan was to copy the recipes down in their books over the winter months.  It ended up being a much bigger job than I had anticipated.  First of all, there are over a hundred recipes among the three lists.  Second, I soon realized that for many of the recipes, I couldn’t just write down ingredients and directions, I also needed to include explanations, like how to whisk flour into butter then slowly add the milk to make Alfredo sauce.  So two years later, the binders are still far from finished.  However, a few weeks before my son made his post-college move to Rochester last fall, I put his binder on the fast track and got it done. As it turns out, I don’t think he’s used it once yet in his new adult life—he works long hours and is too tired and hungry by the time he gets home to cook anything from scratch.  But I believe, someday, he will.  And so will the other two (if I ever finish their books!). And when they do, I hope they will see for themselves how important it is to eat breakfast and dinner and Christmas cookies with the people you love and how favorite recipes connect the past and the future.

Paper Grading

I’ve never been very good about separating my work life from my home life. Before my kids were in school I taught part-time at night.  Sometimes my husband and I would pass in the driveway.  Other than a disrupted dinner hour, it worked out okay.  I was home in time to tuck the kids into bed, and I did my prep work and grading either late at night or early in the morning.  After all the kids were all in school, I started teaching during the day and was eventually hired to teach full-time.  I scheduled my classes and office hours so that I could be home by the time the kids got home from school.  As any parent knows, the hours from after school until bedtime are heavy-duty parenting hours.  By the time my children went to bed, I was usually ready for bed, too.  I often fell asleep reading to one of them. Sometimes after napping for a while, I‘d get back up and grade papers into the wee morning hours.  Other times, I’d only wake up long enough to move to my own bed and set my alarm for some early morning grading.  Once during those years, on a Saturday morning, I was grading papers at the dining room table while the rest of the household was still asleep.  Before too long, I heard my youngest padding down the stairs.  I left the papers where they were and went to the kitchen to fix her some breakfast.  Hours later when I sat back down to work, I was just about to move to the next paper in the stack when something caught my eye at the bottom of the paper I’d just finished.  Under my end-of-the-paper comment to the student, in the same purple pencil I’d been using, my daughter, who was probably six or seven years old at the time, had neatly printed, “I Love You.”  Now, I do love my students, but I often wonder what that dear student would have thought if I’d returned his paper without noticing the extra comment the bottom.  These days, I don’t have to go without sleep to get my work done, at least not very often, and it turns out that’s a good thing because the older I get the harder it is to survive on less than a full-night’s sleep, let alone on the nearly-all-nighters I used to pull.  Yet I sure do miss tucking kids into bed at night and hearing sleepered feet coming down the stairs in the morning, and I especially miss finding a little “I love you” in an unexpected place in the middle of my day.

Watching from Home

Like many towns, our town has a summer recreational soccer program. When my kids played, the youngest age bracket was U6 (Age six and under).  In this age group, the coaches (usually parents) were right out on the soccer field with the teams. As the pint-sized soccer players ran around after the ball in a little herd, the coaches stayed right with them. I think that’s the way it is early on in parenting, too. When your kids are little, you are smack dab in the center of their lives, running around with them, helping them find their way. When they get a bit older, you move to the sidelines; you might run up and down alongside the field offering advice and encouragement, but there's a little distance between you and them now. More time passes and you find yourself up in the bleachers. You’re still watching them and cheering them on, but your kids are out there making their own decisions, and they can’t always hear you. Then before you know it, you’re watching from home. You’re rooting for them: cheering when things go well, booing when they don’t. You give advice when asked. But you’re nowhere near the center of the action anymore.  And although it’s hard to get used to, it’s exactly the way it should be.

 

NEW TXT MSG

My husband and I are not exactly on the cutting edge when it comes to technology.  When the kids were growing up, they claimed we were the only family in town without an answering machine.   We still tape and watch television shows on videocassettes.  And we wouldn’t yet have a flat-screen TV if our kids hadn’t gotten us one for Christmas last year.  So although it kind of surprises even me, I love cell phone technology.  My phone is not a smart phone, I can't play Scrabble on it, and it doesn't even have a QWERTY keyboard, but it does keep me connected to my kids in a way that was unimaginable a generation ago.  When I moved away from home in the early 1980s, my parents used to call once a week, usually on Sunday afternoon when the long-distance rates were lower, and my dad kept a little timer going on his end.  When the white sand was about to trickle out, my dad would clear his throat and say, “Well, we love you, Babe,” and I knew that meant the time was up. When you try to condense a week’s worth of living into a five-minute phone call, you end up hitting a few highlights and leaving a lot unsaid.  Although those weekly phone calls reminded me I was missed and loved, they didn't really do too much more than that.  One thing I love about cell phones is that I can call my kids or they can call me anytime and we can talk for as long as we need or want to.  But what I love just as much or even more is seeing the little text message icon flashing on the front of my screen when I check my phone between classes or when I get up in the morning.  Text messages contain the little things they are thinking and feeling and noticing, things that aren’t important or big enough to call about.  But those are the very things I love hearing, the things that keep us connected day by day.  I know cell phone technology wasn’t created just for parents like me, but it sure came along at just the right time!

The Things They've Left Behind

One of the things I’ve noticed is that when your kids move out, they don’t move out all at once.  It happens in stages.  They head off to college with most of their clothes, but otherwise, their rooms look pretty much the same.  Then they might move from the dorm to a townhouse or off-campus housing, and they take a few more of their things.  After college, they make the big move to their first apartment, and they take even more of their things.  Their rooms look different now; they are heartbreakingly neat and silent, but they are not empty.  They house old clothes and books and stuffed animals.  There are still boxes of treasures under their beds and posters on their walls. The things that remain are things neither they nor I am ready to part with.  So for now, I’m leaving their rooms the way the way they are.  Eventually, though, I’ll have to go through the things they’ve left behind.  Clothes they’ve outgrown and old college textbooks will be easy to box up and give away.  But what am I going to do with all the bits and pieces of their childhoods?

Years of Plenty

I was reading the story of Joseph in Egypt recently, the part where Joseph tells Pharaoh the meaning of his dreams and recommends that Pharaoh find the wisest man in Egypt to manage the grain during the years of plenty so there will be enough to eat when the years of famine come.  Pharaoh thinks this is a great idea and decides Joseph is the man for the job.  I got to thinking that all the years your kids are growing up are years of plenty, not in terms of money (at least not for us), but in terms of all that time you spend together.  You are feasting and you don’t even realize it.  It is a time of abundance, and you kind of take it all for granted and stop noticing and appreciating it because you’re all filled up.  But then, gradually, the time you spend together starts to diminish.  At first, it’s subtle, your kids go to camp, they go on school trips to other countries, they spend more and more time with friends and less and less time at home.  By the end of their senior years in high school, you’re beginning to feel a little hungry, so you gather them in as much as you can for meals and backyard fires and family game nights.  And then, before you know it, just like in Egypt, the years of plenty come to an end.  What follows are not really days of famine, but you do have to start getting along with less.  Sometimes the simplicity is peaceful; other times you get hungry for the old days.  So you do the best you can; you look back on the memories you stored up during the years of plenty.  And as you set just two places at the table, you begin to enjoy the tranquility of this new stage in life.  But you also look forward to the little islands of plenty that appear each time your kids come home. 

Reading in Bed

I've always been a reader. I gobble up books the way my husband gobbles up fruit.  I teach English Education, so there's a lot of reading connected to my job during the academic year--all the books I assign in my courses and many student papers.  But I still keep one or two (or more) books going at home, nibbling at them whenever I have a few minutes, and I every year I look forward to a book feast that lasts all summer long.  When my children were young, sometimes, on Saturday mornings, I used to wish I could just stay in bed and read.  This morning I got my wish.  And maybe it's because it is a cold, rainy Saturday with no real plans--no one is home on break or home for the weekend; the son who lives nearby is gone to Boston; and since we're still transitioning to the empty nest and not very social to begin with, we haven't developed a circle of friends to spend time with on weekends.  Or maybe it's because there was no busy life of kids and cereal bowls and Matchbox cars and coloring books to step back into when I was finished reading in bed. Whatever the reason, although it was nice, it wasn't really as great as I always imagined it would be.  I'd trade it in a heartbeat to be part of a scene like this again on a rainy Saturday morning:

Unexpected Light

When my oldest child left for college, I remember telling people it felt like one of the lights in our five-bulb chandelier was out.  Life went on for the rest of us, but things seemed just a little bit darker than before.  Two years later my second son left for college, and we were down to three bulbs.  Gradually we got used to less light, less laughter, less family life; we even got kind of used to being a family of three for nine months of the year for the next three years.  Then the baby (and only girl) left for college, and life seemed pretty dim for pretty long.  Lately though, at least on some days, I've been noticing things are getting a little brighter again; some unexpected light is coming in through the windows, and no one is more surprised by this than I am.