Filling Time: TwinLife Empty-Nesting

For the second time in six months, California wouldn’t let me leave. Both times I got stuck for an extra night because of weather on the East Coast, and last week, it meant that I did not have any time to recover before I went directly back to work. I should have been exhausted, but instead, I had an incredibly productive week – perhaps making up for the week when I had been sick.

Meetings. Planning. Writing. Decisions. I moved a lot of projects forward in a few short days.

And then I hit the weekend with the realization it was going to be the last one with both my kids at home for a very long time.

Of course, they weren’t really home. They were both consumed by fitting in as many things as possible before they left for school. Hours at work turned into evenings with friends, and whenever they could squeeze the time in, packing and cleaning their rooms. 

So while everyone else was out one night, I made a four-column-list and assigned each of us tasks to get the house cleaned before the kids moved back to college. I left the list on the table where everyone could find it, and I waited for the response. I knew they all knew how to clean – Covid had forced us into family-cleaning mode – but I also knew that everyone was busy.

Without going into the details of everyone’s reaction to their individual list, I’ll just say that it all got done. I personally spent a rainy Sunday tackling the kitchen (which I had assigned to myself because it’s the hardest job) and my other tasks while I contemplated the growing unease in my gut. I needed to stay busy so I didn’t focus on the fact it was the last weekend.

After finishing my downstairs tasks, I walked up the stairs and passed the five bags my daughter had left in the hallway. With my gut anxiety rising, I decided a closet purge might calm me. I was brutal in my decisions, and by the time I was done, I dumped two more bags onto the pile to be donated – one filled with bags I had collected over the years from my teaching conferences (teachers love bags!), and one filled with clothes I decided I would never pick to wear. I still liked some of these clothes, but I hadn’t worn them in over a year. I wanted a cleaner closet; I wanted someone else to have the option to choose these clothes.

So I purged things that had made it through the two purges I had already done in the past year. 

By Sunday night, the kitchen was clean. My closet was cleaner. Five bags of my daughter’s plus two of mine were lined up in the hallway, waiting to leave the house just like my kids were. I was settled in bed, ready for the work week, when my husband walked into the room.

“He’s outside, building a ramp. It’s 10:00 at night, and he’s building a ramp with a chop saw. He’s going to be out there forever.”

I knew what my son was doing. He had spent the summer interning with a nonprofit that serves food to people in a nearby city, and the ramp was part of a project he wanted to complete in order to help the volunteers more easily move the food from storage to the distribution location. He identified and took on this project himself, and at 10:00 at night, with the end of summer bearing down on him, he was outside building it without the best tools to accomplish the task.

So I got out of bed, and I helped.

There was something reflective about working with him as he tried to finish a project at the last possible moment. The intensity was familiar to me, as I often butt up against deadlines. But the moment was different, as I was just the support mechanism, not the driver. This was his work. His commitment. His project. I was just there to hold the wood steady and offer another set of hands.

I went to bed before the ramp was finished, but he did finish it. And the next morning, as I walked downstairs to go to work, I passed all the bags in the hall. I knew that those bags would soon be replaced by the blue bags of college waiting to leave too. 

I knew that soon the house would feel empty again. 

Last year, I thought a lot about what I might be losing when they left. This year feels different. I know they are headed off to grow and to learn, and I look forward to meeting the different people who come back home. I also know that they do come back home, and they are never entirely gone. 

This past week was about pushing forward, sorting through what belonged in the past, finishing what needed to be finished, and deciding what to take forward. And fortunately, in the process, my house got cleaned.