Cindy La Ferle insists that midlife is an exciting time for women. A veteran columnist in metro Detroit, she's widely recognized for her award-winning essays on home and family. These days she'll tackle almost any topic. Whether she's reinventing her empty nest or rehashing her political views, she believes the personal is universal -- and that the best is yet to come.

When the kids leave home
by Cindy La Ferle

  My son’s last season of high school was a bittersweet time for me. When I wasn’t caught up in the merry-go-round of senior banquets and graduation parties, I spent a lot of time wondering where his childhood had flown. When no one else was looking, I often searched for it in a family album crammed with photos of birthday parties, Fourth of July bike parades, Christmas mornings, and Halloween nights.
   Around that time, it also hit me that one of the sweetest gifts of midlife is the maternal amnesia that blurs our other memories of infancy and early childhood -- the exploding diapers, the post-partum blues, the marathon temper tantrums. Not to mention those snarky adolescent insults.
   When our kids prepare to leave home for college, after all, we tend to focus only on the Hallmark moments.
   All of this reminiscing seems a bit maudlin to me now. But at the time, revisiting memories of my son’s childhood helped soothe my early empty-nest blues. Pausing to reflect and grieve made it easier for me to move on with my own life. It also made me grateful for the privilege of raising a child -- and for the chance to spend so much time with young people.
   During the high school years, for example, our home was the favorite gathering place for my son’s friends. Looking in our refrigerator in those days, you’d never have guessed that we were a small family of three. I made a part-time career of stocking snacks and soda for the neighborhood kids. When I unloaded my grocery cart in the checkout line, clerks would often ask if I was feeding a very large family or hosting a party. I always answered yes to both questions.
   And since my “extended family” left for college when my son did, my sense of loss encompassed more than one child.

Feathering a new nest    Grieving isn’t unusual in the early weeks of empty nesting. As a therapist-friend explained it, kids give us a daily sense of mooring and purpose. (We've organized our schedules around them for 18 years, haven't we?) That sense of mooring suddenly disappears when they move out – and getting used to a quieter household can be a huge adjustment.
    Still, few parents I know are comfortable with the term “empty nest.” An empty nest sounds pathetic and forlorn – adjectives that hardly fit the millions of accomplished women and men who are reinventing their lives after child-rearing.
  “A word signifying a void or a vacuum is an unfair way to describe a time when life can be full of growth possibilities,” note Laura Kastner and Jennifer Wyatt in The Launching Years: Strategies for Parenting from Senior Year to College Life (Three Rivers Press). Even more important than finding a new catchphrase for “the empty nest” is shifting our focus to the fresh opportunities awaiting our kids on the other side of the threshold. Our job, after all, is to help them learn how to leave us; to let them go.
   But whatever you choose to name the new parenting phase you’re facing, there’s no shame in acknowledging the quiet heartache that tugs when your child grabs his or her diploma and prepares for takeoff. Meanwhile, it also helps to commiserate with other moms and dads who are momentarily conflicted about their changing roles.
   As essayist Marion Winik wrote, “Once you’re a mother you can never think something else is the most important thing.” It’s hard not to feel ambivalent when “the most important thing” is relocating to the other side of the state. It’s hard not to feel sad and proud and thrilled and unmoored -- all at the same time.

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Copyright 2009 by Cindy La Ferle. Cindy La Ferle's award-winning essay collection, Writing Home, is distributed by Wayne State University Press and is available in bookstores nationally. Cindy lives in Royal Oak, where she teaches writing workshops in memoir and personal essays. She blogs at Cindy's Home Office: www.laferle.com. Send comments to cindy@laferle.com