Larry Rosen is a San Francisco writer, editor and host of the podcast “(Is It) Good for the Jews?” Reach him at [email protected].
Right now I should be welcoming my son home after a successful first year away at college, but instead he’s texting photos to us from Bonn, Germany. That’s where he’ll be for the next six weeks, learning German and satisfying his language requirement for graduation. As an engineering major, he needs to capitalize on every opportunity to get general education requirements out of the way, even if they materialize as what one friend has suggested might be a “glorified pub crawl.”
He will be home for only six weeks this summer, which is probably a harbinger of summers to come and a reminder that, while this is my last Empty Nest column for J., the reality of our own empty nest refuses to tie itself up so neatly. Turns out there’s no finish line to this particular race. Six weeks this summer, maybe four next summer, two after that and then, quick as a wink, phone calls and texts setting up our next visit to whatever far-flung home our child has chosen for the start of his career and adult life.
It’s enough to make me nostalgic for last year, when he and I both spent the eve of college orientation lying wide awake in our hotel room, wondering what was coming next. For me that night was yesterday, but for my child, and for the adult he’s become in giant leaps since, it likely seems like something that happened decades ago in a dream, to a self that didn’t know what to do when he ran out of toothpaste or where to go to buy really bad processed food after midnight.
Spoiler alert: He figured out both pretty quickly.
That this is my last column gives me a chance to look back at the past year and assess: How did we do? How did he do? Did we send our only child off well-prepared, confident, full of life skills and ready to solve problems and face challenges minus daily phone calls home and pleas to associate deans for safe spaces and more overt trigger warnings? And at home did we set ourselves up for a life that welcomes new opportunities and a quiet, orderly space, or did we just spend an entire year pining?
Of course, we did both. Reality is seldom so black-and-white. The truth is, I just spent a year writing about something that seems like it should be concrete — “How does one’s life change when his child leaves for college?” — and is anything but. This whole empty nest thing is a moving target, nuanced, full of surprises and never, ever anything close to solved. As much as I love our newfound flexibility and spontaneity (and clean house), sometimes I’ll still find myself somewhere — last month it was at Hoover Dam, during a road trip to see my parents — thinking that some things are just way more fun as a family than they are as an individual, or even a couple.
I think the feeling is mutual, since last week our boy called to tell me he’d bought a Blu-ray about Yosemite because it reminded him of the trip we took during spring break. “That was a really fun trip,” he said. “Can we go on a family vacation this summer?”
We like to think of life as having a backstory that leads to a finished product, but the truth is that there is no finished product. Our situation changed last August, continued to change throughout the year and continues to change up to and beyond the present. Someday alarmingly soon, my son might be FaceTiming us with his own family, proudly holding up a baby for us to see while we beam, bite our tongues that want to offer advice and wish we all lived closer.
But it’ll be OK. Bottom line is this: Whatever changes may come, whatever we’re doing and wherever we are, the three of us — mother, father and son — are never too far apart. And in that sense, what we’ve got really isn’t an empty nest at all.