Like so many of us, David & Veronica James are experiencing the collision of baby boomer with empty nester. How to cope? Veronica calls it her “Dirty Little Secret” … but she tells us!

David and I have one chick left in the nest. He graduates from high school in June. And I am marking the days. I keep a gigantic calendar and mark a red X each day. For my son’s sake (and to avoid horrified looks from house guests), I keep the calendar between the mattresses of my bed.

I’m fully aware how bad this looks, so I will explain myself. I LOVE MY KIDS! Good, now I’ve got that out! But,when June rolls around, I will have spent almost twenty five years of my life raising them. I deserve this dirty little secret.

Such callousness does not make me impervious to the emotional milestones along the way. I recently received my son’s cap and gown picture taken at his school. My heart literally stopped when I saw it. I have spent many moments in the privacy of my bedroom looking at this and his other school photos and wondering how my baby has gotten so big. And in time I will be strong enough to take the photos down from the ceiling above my bed. Maybe when we put the house on the market.

I have learned that it pays to plan ahead so you can avoid random emotional outbursts. My oldest daughter will never forgive me for my coyote-like howling from the front row aisle seat at her graduation ceremony. So I have resolved that on my son’s graduation day, I will not sit in the vicinity of any of the following people:

1) Other mothers graduating their youngest child
2) Single mothers graduating their only child
3) My husband

The school community at large will thank me.

I have similar plans for my son’s last Tuesday with us, the last macaroni and cheese dinner, his last dentist appointment, and of course, the last time he throws his shoes and socks into the middle of the living room floor. Trust me, it pays to have your bases covered when you have the tendency to be an emotional wreak.

If all else fails, I can just take a peek under my mattress …

[Read more from David & Veronica at their Web site, The Gypsy Nester.]

ShareThis

Are the kids gone? Are you having fun without them? Don’t feel guilty; David James doesn’t. He says there’s life after kids, and you’re absolutely entitled to enjoy it!

When Veronica and I came up with the idea to write about living life after raising kids, and actually looking forward to it, one of the first things I did was Google “empty nesters.” I wanted to see if anyone was looking at this the same way we are. You know, isn’t it great that the kids have moved out and we have life to ourselves again?! To be untethered and free to wander the globe. To be Gypsy Nesters instead of empty nesters.

But no, just about everything I found lamented how terrible it is to not have the kids around anymore. The main item on the very first page I clicked into was an enormous ad for an Alzheimer’s patch. Holy crap! We just finished raising our kids; we’re not dead! If twenty-some odd years of child rearing has caused me to lose some memory (or eyesight, hearing, mobility or … um … I forget … whatever), by golly I’m gonna count it as a plus and learn to like it.

Do I really want to remember every battle fought along the way? I think not. I’ll gladly let my memory fade just enough to color the overall picture and recall it as pretty good stuff. I must be missing something here on the web. Are these people daft?

There is even a syndrome name now, because these days even the smallest emotion or complaint must be labeled as something: this one is Empty Nest Syndrome. No doubt, right this second, several pharmaceutical giants are frantically testing some drug that was originally intended to treat some truly dreadful disease to see if they can market it as the only way to escape the treacherous death grip of EMPTY NEST SYNDROME. That reminds me, I didn’t sleep all that great last night; I must remember to get to the doctor to get something done about this insidious Periodic Interrupted Sleep Syndrome (better known as PISS) that I’m suffering from.

But I digress (yet another syndrome perhaps?). Let’s go back to the original dilemma. Shouldn’t we be looking forward to this empty nesting portion of life? Most of us have made more than a few sacrifices to get here, so I say, stick a fork in me, I’m done. It’s not selfish to take a little time for yourself at this point. It’s insane not to.

We are animals, and as such, continuation of the species is one of our prime motivations. However, unlike the other critters, when we have finished the job, we’re allowed to have some fun. Give yourself a pat on the back! Job well done, the kids have grown up into large human beings fully capable of feeding themselves. I, for one, am a firm believer in letting them do their own hunting and gathering. Trust me, when they get hungry, they will find food, but you have to let them do it for themselves. Otherwise they’ll end up like zoo animals. If you feed the tigers every day, they never learn to hunt. Then when you put them in the wild, they starve. Personally, we taught our little cubs that if they get really hungry, they can always kill and eat a bag of Ramen noodles.

They’ve gotten pretty good at it too.

[Read more at The Gypsy Nesters.com]

ShareThis