And We Think Our Kids Go Far…

It absolutely positively could NOT have been a coincidence that on the very day before I brought my son to the airport to travel to the other side of the world The New York Times ran a story about Voyager 1 exiting the solar system.  

What, I wondered, would that spacecraft’s mother be feeling?  Imagining, first of all, that a not-exactly-darling contraption like this could in fact have a mother, I envisioned her in Houston (where else?) coping with the fact that her offspring is floating around in interstellar space some 11.7 billion miles away.  That makes the distance my firstborn was going – around 8,000 miles –seem like just a few steps into another room in the house. So just drop him off already and get back to regular business.  What’s for lunch?

Many of us parents have gotten used to the fact that, once they hit maybe 15, our kids are likely to start zooming around the globe much more frequently than we ever did.  When we were in college, taking a semester in Europe during junior year became a new thing, and it was still kind of a big deal. Now, though, high school students may hop down to Haiti or over to China or Senegal in the blink of an eye and be back in time to take their places on varsity teams.  Practically seamless.

We have a friend, a clergyman, who muses that last year his kids were going back and forth between five different continents while he pretty much stayed in his same church complex all the time.

Of course, we can still feel the absence of our offspring even if they’re in the next town over.  Is it just in my circle, or hasn’t there been a whole lot of talking about the “empty nest” recently?  Bedrooms that were just yesterday buzzing with activity (particularly the laptop version of activity, with clothes and wet towels all over the floor) now stand empty, with desks cleared off.   It’s sad, it’s eerie, or it’s liberating  — more likely a combination of all three.

It’s not like this is anything new, just that it’s our turn to experience it from the perspective of the people still left at the kitchen sink.  Maybe my own mother was unusual, but I recall her being only too ready for all of us to fly off.  “Go ahead, leave the nest!” she’d say good-naturedly, with a flutter of her hand.  We didn’t take offense.  How could I, the fifth child, especially not recognize that she might be really ready for time to herself, as well as time with my father without us around?  It didn’t even matter that she wasn’t a career woman.

From what I can tell, those of us who are going through this particular transition with a swirl of mixed feelings are, in no particular order, doing all of the following: having pangs of missing kids in their usual places; being glad for kids growing up and doing cool things, often very far away; recognizing that we cannot make arrangements – and are we ever used to making arrangements — to secure their constant happiness; facing the need to develop some of our other muscles besides the parenting one.  Now, to put it baldly, we get a chance to see what else we’ve got, and what else we have to give. Those of us who have a spouse around might also look at him or her and say, “Now tell me a little bit about yourself…”

In the past couple of weeks, I have driven each of our children, and of course their stuff, to two schools and one airport.  It is just now dawning on me that the months ahead may include significantly less driving than I have been used to doing for the past, say, fifteen years.  This fact alone opens up amazing possibilities.

Yet it’s true that I do have one dependent creature still at home – our dog Rocky. And wouldn’t you know that he LOVES getting in the car?  In fact, he was all for going to the airport.

OK, maybe that actually had more to do with his feeling of attachment to the young man who was going.  In any case, he has an optimism about travelling that is endearing (and definitely contrasting with his anxiety about thunderstorms).  Still, I’m glad he doesn’t seem to have any immediate plans to bust out.

Speaking of busting out, Voyager I — “the Little Spacecraft That Could” – must feel powerfully lonely out there beyond the solar system. With Jupiter and Saturn far behind, there hasn’t even been much to take pictures of in a long while.

But on it goes, bravely forward. Any mother or father of this thing sure better make some substantial plans for keeping busy.  We can do the same, even though our kids may well be back by Thanksgiving.