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Reflections on Identity
Empty Nesting Before It’s Time
Finding Purpose in the Quiet Days without Kids
This is me, learning to feel complete: sitting in a hotel bar alone with a plate of french fries and a glass of Chardonnay. I am in my own city, a mere six blocks from the apartment I now call home. The hotel bar is filled with people just passing through; being amongst them makes me feel anonymous, like I have temporarily become dissociated from the city streets where I have lived and raised my kids for the past quarter century.
I have my laptop and an afternoon that yawns expansively in front of me, no one who needs me, no one to feed or cheer up or entertain. After decades of being tethered to my children, barely able to eke out even an hour to myself, I have back the thing I gave up when they were born: time. Time like this, unspoken for, is precious — but also, hard as it is to admit, terrifying, a chasm that begs to be filled meaningfully. How do I find purpose in this time when I am free to create it, not just respond to the demands around me?
I still have one of my three kids at home. At thirteen, she divides her time between my apartment, which we call home, and her dad’s apartment, which we distinguish from ours by calling it the name of the street on which it is situated. Years ago, I agreed to refer to both apartments by their locations. One could not be our home while the other was Dad’s home. They would both have to be home, which, in their dilution, meant they both became something less than home. I did this at the request of my husband, who wanted to create his own home for our kids. I wanted that for the kids, for them to feel home was with me and home was also with their father. I wanted that, I truly did, but I could not easily abide by it.
After more than two decades as the primary parent, I am not able to play along with this notion that my kids’ homes are equally with me and with their father. No matter what I have lost in recent years — my marriage, my home-before-this home, my other home, the one in the country with a garden and a lifetime of memories I created from scratch and feverishly cultivated— one thing I will never give up: the knowledge that home is with me, that wherever I am is home for our children.
