Last week our eldest child flew the coop. Literally, went to the airport and caught a plane to London. I’ve mixed feelings about this. Excited for her, of course. Glad we have encouraged a sense of adventure and capability in her, and enabled her to spread her wings.
This is the job. To raise independent adults who can make a positive contribution to the world. To render oneself obsolete in the “hand-holding to function well” department. And to build relationships based on connection rather than dependency.
High fives to us on a job mostly well done.
But I remember being this age. I remember walking into the future with barely a backward glance. Becoming involved and embroiled in a life of my own making. I know from experience how little a role your parents play in your day-to-day life from this point forward. We’re no longer breaking bread together on a daily basis, or seeing first-hand what life looks like for her. We’re still connected of course. Nobody is distant or disinterested. We’re important, just no longer central. This is as it should be, but it is not unreasonable to feel a pang of loss.
The older I get the more I realise that life is a series of stages. You don’t notice it at first. You enter each stage blissfully unaware that we’re all part of a bio-social system that drives us in particular ways. Footloose and fancy free whilst you work out who you are, and what you want. Coupling up and laying the foundations for family. Desiring children and then suddenly knee deep in rearing them through their own stages – babyhood, childhood, adolescence. Nappies, endless renditions of wheels on the bus, spelling practice, navigating friendship hugs, hours of learner driver supervision. And then, almost before you blink, they’ve left home and you’re designated Empty Nesters.
This week I took our 17-year-old to WA to visit my brother and his family. They have a 2-year-old, almost entirely the opposite end of the spectrum. She’s emerging from babyhood into childhood. Everything is new, shiny and bright. She’s learning everything, bustling with curiosity and excitement about the world around her. She is trying out new words on a minute-by-minute basis, swirling them around her mouth to see how they feel, and what response they evoke. It’s soul-meltingly cute.
Our son is on the other end of that stage of life, emerging from childhood into adulthood. In the transition lounge anyway. If anyone’s doing the learning at this stage of life, it’s us. We’re having to relearn what it means to be a parent here. Less about control, and more about conversation. Less about telling, more about hearing. And the giving of space. Space for them to fly their own kites. Earn their wings. That lesson about needing space starts around aged 12, and it’s a hard earned one.
We, the parents, are also entering a new stage of life. Empty nester stage looms large. This time next year both our kids should, hopefully, be ensconced in campus life and well on their way to adulthood. That leaves us to rattle around an empty house, at a loss of what to do with our time, apparently. I don’t like the phrase “empty nest”. It is narrowly and negatively framed, and somewhat demeaning.
There are better ways to think about this. There is a meme going around, which I quite love. Now that I want it, I can’t find it of course. But it goes something along the lines of parenting being akin to flight school. That’s what we parents are – flight school instructors. Our job is to train and tool up our kids to fly their own planes. Success means watching them take to the skies, and leave training school behind.
I’m going to rephrase this stage of life we’re about to enter as Graduated. It reshapes the empty nester stage from being focused on loss, emptiness and parenting to what it should be. Freedom, success, and the opportunity to reinvent or rediscover the humans inside the parents we are.
Our runway is emptying out. There is one child still on deck, practicing his take offs and landings, doing laps in the sky and occasionally buzzing the control tower (yes, that is a Top Gun OG reference). But the other has successfully launched her plane into the sky and gone on an adventure. She calls in with updates now and then, or at least responds to Whatsapp enquiries from us. This is as it should be. The landing deck is always open of course. But she’s flying her own plane now. No longer merely a passenger in ours.
And us, we’re out to drinks. Doing final pre-flight checks with our son, and looking ahead to taking our own planes for a spin too. One of these day’s we’ll also fly the coop and leave the empty nest to strangers for a tidy sum of rent whilst we adventure onwards.
Onwards.
Sharlene
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Reflections from Middle Age 
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