Mammas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Grown Ups

I have become one of those mothers I used to laugh at. Remember the mothers who cried when they put their little ones on the school bus for the first day of kindergarten? The ones who slipped tear-stained middle-school graduation pictures into the ongoing and seemingly perpetual scrapbook? All I could see back then was the few hours of newly gained freedom I would enjoy each day--the loosening of the reins that ran between me and my child...the light relaxation of constant vigilance.

That's great--until you send the last one off to college...two thousand miles away. It feels like I just gave him the car keys and he's driven off with the car---which happens to be my life. I'm just about past the part where soppy country songs about mothers make me cry. I've pretty much mastered the self-pity part. Haven't yet managed to cook only enough for two.

The trick seems to be to look at it not just as a beginning for our kids, but as a beginning for us--to find who we are now. No matter how ill-fitting some of us may have found the maternal mantel, we wore it for a long time. And truth is, we won't stop being parents. We just stop being in situ and become eminus. Or as a New York Times columnist put it, we're downsized moms.

I was given a book as a gift meant to console, but that actually made me curl up in the fetal position. I highly recommend The Empty Nest, edited by Karen Stabiner, to any parent who is anticipating, dreading, living in, or finally over the cutely named 'empty nest syndrome.' Once you get past the essays that make you crawl into the closet weeping, there are great insights into the relationship of adult parents and adult children (or faux-adult children, depending on how grown-up your kid is).

Contributors include one of my favorites, Anna Quindlen; columnist Ellen Goodman; Harry Shearer; novelist Susan Shreve; another favorite--Letty Cotin Pogrebin--and many more.