brushfire"This, yes, this, it was always like this." -Stanley Koehler
REFLECTIONS OF AN EMPTY NESTER
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“How far from me my children built again.”
This is a line from a poem, “The Blue Umbrella,” by my father, the poet Stanley Koehler. The poem depicts a family on a beach, the father dozing under the shade of the umbrella while his children build sandcastles by the water's edge. When he awakes, the sun has dropped in the sky, the shadows lengthened, and his children, following the ebb of the tide and the retreating waves, have distanced themselves from him. It is of course a metaphor for parenthood — a process that is at once gradual and instant at the same time. That is how I feel about our last child departing for college. “Will you cry when you drop Jared off?” my daughters asked me. I replied that I didn't cry when either of them left; that for me it was a happy time, a time for celebration, not tears. I'm sure they were imagining their father and me driving away, the tears streaming down our faces while our son grew smaller in the rear view mirror. It’s a romantic image, but not necessarily how it happens. My friends describe crying at unexpected times and, in one case, at all times. For some it is the anticipation of the event. For others, it's the aftermath. It could be while you're folding a faded and worn and particularly familiar shirt at the dryer. One friend said she got emotional every time she passed her daughter's (uncharacteristically tidy) bedroom. There are a lot of emotions involved — nostalgia, melancholy, apprehension, regret — but sadness is not one of them, at least for me. There is also triumph — we did it! — relief, gratitude, excitement, joy. The process is gradual, like the receding tide, the sinking of the sun below the horizon. The transformation, on the other hand, is immediate. One second they are there; the next they are gone. “Sun, that will drive them thence,” — the poem continues — “these hours undo me.” A version of this appeared in the Grosse Pointe News.
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Mary Anne BrushJournalist, fiction writer, wife and mother |