The empty nest

It has been a little over a week since Dave and I settled our youngest child into a college dorm room. We came home to our empty house on Saturday night. By Friday, six days later, I finally quit listening for the household to stir into action in the morning and comprehended that after Dave leaves for work each day I am truly alone.

This is a new experience for me. Last time I didn't have kids in the house (at least at both ends of the school day) -- 22 years ago -- I worked 40 hours per week. Now I work 15 at the public library and have various volunteer positions, mainly church-related.

I've told people over the years that I have never been bored at home. That's still true. There's no danger of boredom setting in any time soon. I come from a long line of putterers. According to my World Book dictionary "putter" means: To keep busy in a rather useless way. Yes, that's it exactly. I can happily putter away long hours on projects with little real value such as, say, alphabetizing my CD collection or pulling weeds in the garden one at a time by hand rather than finding a tool that would expedite the job. It would be easy to settle into those types of activities. The challenge will be to direct my energy toward projects that require more effort than puttering but are also of more value.

One important goal I've set is to maintain relationships beyond my church. For the past 17 years, I've had children enrolled in the local school system, and their activities have been my gateway into community life. There was a time when it was unusual for me to see an unfamiliar child on the streets of our small town. I knew my children's classmates and got to know the parents of those classmates at school sporting events and concerts and open houses and summer ballgames at the park. I could attend school events and count on recognizing many faces in the crowd. We would chat and compare notes on child-raising and catch up with each other and then go our separate ways until the next event brought us together. Now those other parents are moving past their days of involvement in the school just as I am doing. Their children have gone off to college and careers just as mine have. I need to figure out places to frequent in order to continue those happenstance relationships. My library job helps, but there are many among that crowd who never come into the library.

Friday evening Dave and I went to the high school football game. With our youngest having just graduated, we still found plenty of acquaintances among the crowd -- parents with younger kids still in school. I came away from the game feeling like I'd had my "social fix" for the week. I sort of wish we actually enjoyed watching sports so that we would continue to be motivated to attend the games. But the truth is, I only go for the social interaction and Dave often declines to accompany me.

A book I recently read by Joseph R. Myers called The Search to Belong addresses, among other things, the loss of front porches from our streets. The front porch was a place to sit and chat with someone on neutral territory -- in full view of the neighborhood rather than in the intimacy of the home, in public space yet with some level of privacy. The school gym, cafeteria, tennis courts, and ball fields have served as my front porch for the past 17 years. Myers suggested that Starbucks is the new front porch. Besides the literal problem of not even knowing the location of the closest Starbucks and not drinking coffee, I'm a little reluctant to tie my social interaction to places that require plenty of disposable income. Again, the library is one alternative. It's free and draws many people for visits of various frequency and duration. Still, I'm looking for other possibilities.

One thing I'm doing is making more frequent trips to the local grocery store, buying less per trip. How the simple household task of "getting groceries" has changed over the years -- from going one evening a week after work, to packing up babies for a weekly outing, to moving back to evening outings because I couldn't handle three children under 5 in the grocery store alone, to shopping while the kids were in school and racing home to beat the schoolbus, to leaving a note telling where I was and when I expected to be home, to sending teenagers out for last-minutes items. Now I just pop out and get what I need when I choose with only my husband to keep informed of my whereabouts if my grocery run extends beyond his work hours.

At every stage of life there have been new joys even as some of the old joys became but memories. It seems that the empty nest stage is no exception.