Between a Rock and a Hot Place by Tracey Jackson

Author:Tracey Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

6

The Biggest Pink Slip You Will Ever Get

A child enters your home and for the next twenty years makes so much noise you can hardly stand it. The child departs, leaving the house so silent you think you are going mad.

—JOHN ANDREW HOLMES

When I was thirty-two my first child was born; six months into my fifty-first year she left home for college. It has for me been one of the hardest parts of hitting fifty. I am not alone in this; every woman I talk to about it (and I talk to a lot) feels a sense of sorrow, despondency, loneliness, and at times even abandonment when a child leaves home. It’s one of the thresholds we cross that we are totally unprepared for and I don’t think we ever get over entirely. We may make adjustments, as we have no choice, and we learn to live with them and they become our life, but “adjustment” is the key word in that scenario. And, sad to say, many parents never adjust entirely.

As my father said to me recently, his mother referred to the “kids” coming over when she was in her seventies and he was in his fifties. Many parents never want their kids to leave, and if the children do leave, the parents want them back as often as possible. While some parents eventually turn their kids’ room into a den with a fold-out sofa for when they come home—“You sure you can’t stay through Sunday?”—many leave them exactly as they were the day the child left for college, BeeGees poster, swimming trophies, and stuffed animals all in their original places, waiting patiently for their owner’s return. In fact, some parents leave their kid’s room untouched for the next twenty or thirty years, or until the parents move out themselves. I remember seeing pictures of the late Dr. Randy Pausch’s room that his mother had kept entirely intact—rocket ship wall paintings and all—and he was forty-seven by then. I suppose it’s a feeble attempt to pretend that time has stood still and the kids will come home for more than a long weekend, Thanksgiving, or a week or two at Christmas or in the summer.

Our kids always remain our kids, and they are still children in our hearts. Somewhere in the not-so-evolved part of our minds we feel they belong at home. Ask most parents where their kid’s home is and they will say home is where the parents are. Now, the kids may be living elsewhere; employment, love, and life may have moved them geographically elsewhere, sort of like Dorothy hurtling through the skies in The Wizard of Oz, but home is the place they lived before they moved out to start a life of their own. Everything else is just a house.

The exit of your children from the family abode is one of the first big stations we pass through once we’ve climbed aboard the Elderly Express. True, it’s at the very beginning of the journey, but there’s no denying that the journey has begun.

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