Filling Time: TwinLife Empty-Nesting

Last week started with laser focus on work. It was time for the accreditation site visit that we had been working over a year to accomplish successfully. I spent Monday and Tuesday on Zoom, being interviewed by the review team. Fortunately, our power didn’t go out until Thursday, when I was on Zoom in a meeting with my boss, telling him how great the visit had gone. Friday was Halloween, and we were still running on a generator.

It was not the first Halloween we have been without power. In fact, when my kids were 4, we had a Halloween snowstorm that knocked it out for multiple days. The next year, Superstorm Sandy hit just before Halloween. We didn’t have power for 15 days that time (and the Internet came back on day 21!).

Since then, everyone in our neighborhood has invested in a generator, so being without power on Halloween this year was neither a novelty nor as disruptive as it was back then. However, this year was different for another reason.

My kids were not home.

And when I say they weren’t home, I don’t mean that they were out with friends on Halloween night, which has been the case for many years. However, my son, in particular, had a tradition. All the way through senior year he and his friends would trick-or-treat in our neighborhood and the surrounding streets and end at our house for the ultimate candy swap. I was one of those parents who said “I’d rather teens choose trick-or-treating than drinking on Halloween!” And they did. They’d start the evening by playing football or whiffle ball in the front yard, and they’d end with either a candy draft or trade. I always got a few Rolos and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in exchange for hot apple cider or hot chocolate.

This year Halloween was Friday, after a long week at work, intensified by the accreditation site visit and on-again-off-again power and Internet. By the time my last meeting ended at 3PM on Friday, I was ready for my kids to show up and start getting ready for the night.

But they weren’t there. My husband arrived home early to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters, whom we expected to start arriving around 4PM. By 3:15, I was walking aimlessly around the house, my body humming with anxiety.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I don’t know what to do,” I responded. I knew if I went back to my computer I’d get interrupted by the doorbell at the worst time for making any progress on anything, and honestly, at that point, I really didn’t want to work any more. But that wasn’t really what was bothering me.

I finally stopped pacing and said, “It’s weird, not having them here. This is the first time it’s felt weird.”

It was a tradition disrupted – not by the power outage but somehow the break was deeper because of those power outages of the past being reflected in the current moment. This time we weren’t together, facing a new situation, creating memories. They were off on their own, creating their own fun, their own memories that we wouldn’t share.

As I stood there, feeling weird, my husband said, “Well, I’ll answer the door.” His words freed me to tackle my “clean up” list, knowing I could do it uninterrupted. And I knew just the task to do.

I pulled down the attic stairs and started carting boxes and boxes of “costumes” that had moved from my mom’s attic to my own. Fifty years of original clothes and various costumes, neatly stored and labeled by decade, genre, or character had been sitting up there, waiting for one of my kids to need them for a production (which happened often) – or for Halloween. Though my husband had always been willing to take our kids to the Halloween store to find a store-bought costume, I loved the years when we dug into the boxes and made our own. During that first Halloween snowstorm, my son became a “Mardi Gras cowboy,” and during the pandemic, the “adventurer (my son) found a lamp and out popped a genie (my daughter)!” We had so many options in those costume boxes in the attic.

But my kids weren’t home anymore, and even without digging into the boxes, they had each come up with at least three costumes for their various events at college. I knew it was time to purge.

So I did. I filled time by emptying about 15 bins into bags to donate, and in the process I was able to organize just a few bins for them to look through next year before they go back to school. Who knows, maybe they will take a vintage 1970s, 80s, or 90s outfit back with them to wear as a costume! I have some from each decade, tucked away, remembering the past this Halloween.