The Nest Will Empty

MY GOOD FRIEND VERNIE CHAPOOSE WAS KIND ENOUGH TO CONTRIBUTE AS A GUEST BLOGGER:


It’s a given. You know from the moment you see a little face change color and scream, that God has let you borrow a child. We call them our own, raise them as best we know how - but in the end they leave you to live their own lives. It’s a moment we live for, threaten to celebrate, hope comes sooner than later, then the day comes when you’re cleaning up after them for the last time and find water leaking down your face.

I look around the room - the rooms, he called his own and move the scattered piles of memories folded or piled in heaps and see in them his life as I knew it.
A dozen and a half years ago he came to me, welled up into this world out of an incision and became a part of my world. Nine years later he was mine and mine alone forsaking and forsaken by his mother.

Sitting in his room(s,) surrounded by all the years’ accumulation of clothing, gear, cards and pictures, I feel like a part of me has gone out and left there now, is an empty hole that is sucking the energy out of me. I know he’s not gone, as all the world knows gone, dead and gone. He’ll be back, but when he returns he’ll be a man - not my little boy who needed me.

Eight years. Eight years of holding everything together, being the pillar of strength for this little family. Eight years of being the Father, the Mother, the maid, the laundry girl and every other thing, teacher, counselor, chauffer and mechanic. I can’t say never, but rarely did I let the teardrops fall - and my boys didn’t see them on my face.

The problem, as I see it, with raising children, is that if you do it right there is no need for them to come back to the nest and ask for your help. Four sons I’ve raised from childhood to fathers themselves. The oldest have their lives, their children and their wives. They are making it in the world and sometimes come by to visit. But none really need me to hold their hand as they go on in the world. Yes I’ll pat myself on the back, there is no one else in this empty house to do it for me.

So I’ll pack up the house. The children's home for their entire lives, mine after the divorce, but theirs since their inception. I’ll pack up their lives and move some of it into storage, send some to good will, haul much of it to the dump, and pack me up to another life somewhere down the road. I know that life is more than the stuff we gather to ourselves. That beyond this life are riches beyond measure. But being a Dad, and living just to be a Dad for all those years…

I sit in his room, surrounded by the scattered remnants of memories lived and discarded as a boy traveled the road to manhood.

And I cry.