Someone famously said, long ago, “There is nothing new under the sun.” While we all nod along in agreement with those words, we are still surprised when we enter a new stage in life and find out that everything we’ve heard about it is true.
For my husband and I, this year, it is the dreaded “empty nest” stage. After more than 30 years of baby rearing and child-chasing, teenage cat-herding and drama control, safety exhortations to careless drivers, juggling schedules, and urgent plans, and 10 different stages of orthodontia, our wildly complicated household has been reduced to a puzzled middle-aged couple in a too-big house.
So, there being nothing new, we are feeling the pangs exactly as you’d expect. I imagine myself as a cheerful, bustling, managing mama duck with a string of ducklings suddenly deprived of her darlings. She looks disconsolately about the empty nest, which now seems to her a mere arrangement of sticks and daubs, and not the warm and cozy home full of keen interest and tenderness that it was when the ducklings were in it.
My husband (Papa duck in this analogy), who loved to come bursting on the scene each evening after work to dispense advice and admonitions, is feeling out of sorts as well, but insists that we have done everything right and this is our reward.
“Some reward!” I quack indignantly.
I don’t quite understand myself apart from the daily motherhood that has marked my life these last 30 years. Even though I am a professional wearing several hats, my first concern — by a long stretch — has always been the children.
This focus was imprinted in my female DNA by God and pressed onto my heart by a very traditional upbringing. As a little girl, my own mother told me many times: “Mija, los hijos son tu alegria. Ten muchos para que nunca te falten.” (“My daughter, children are your joy. Have many, that you may never lack for them.”)
How true were her words.
Looking after the children shot happiness through my veins. It filled me with the purest, most innocent enjoyment. Mostly.
And when it was difficult, which it often was, another kind of joy, a quieter gladness, came to help me: the deep-down thrill of knowing that I was about my Father’s business. In other words, that my vocation of motherhood was tinged with the divine, that in that anxious moment at the bedside of a sick child, or in the rending conversation with a troubled teenager, I was participating in God’s work of creation. Giving life and sustaining life, forming and pruning souls, experiencing the sacrifice of the flesh in labor and fatigue: there I was at my Lord’s side, working in his workshop and hanging on the cross.
That perfect, providential combination in motherhood, of nature and divine calling, is an extraordinary thing. All mothers, I think, experience the thrill of it. Some mothers, like me, are fortunate enough to understand the theological and spiritual implications. Fortunate because I know, now, as I rattle around the house with my dear husband, that my Father is calling me to forge a new path to holiness. He has my salvation in mind, as he has had since my conception, and he has new, joyful jobs for me to do in his garden. I don’t have to be afraid of the emptiness of having no purpose and the sadness of idle hands.
My husband and I have talked it over together, and prayed about it, together. We can sense the danger of letting work fill those hours that used to be used so profitably raising the children. That would be a narrowing of life, indeed. We can also feel the temptation of frivolity — of getting caught up in vain pursuits and distractions to escape ennui. There is the even more awful danger of sadness, which grips me every afternoon around carpool time, but which we all know is an ally of the enemy.
My plan is to be quiet for a while, so I can listen to the voice of the Spirit. I am already starting to imagine where it might lead me. My husband needs me, and I love him dearly. He has a great soul for me to tend. And perhaps all those years of motherhood have made me wise with the blessed wisdom of grandmothers. I will pray for that, and for hearts that will grow closer to God when I share with them the story of my joy.
