Familyhood (18 page)

The Empty Nest

D
uring the last earthquake
, the electricity went out in our house. Actually, it may not have been an earthquake. It could have just been high winds. Or a guy working on the cable TV. Or a coyote playing games, it's hard to tell; unless a meteor slams specifically into your house, you never know exactly why the power goes out. It just does.

Unlike most people, I kind of like when the power goes out. As a responsible person who pays his electric bills, and who is also in no way handy around the house and could therefore never do anything with wires that might
cause
an outage, I enjoy basking in the knowledge that if the power does go out, it couldn't possibly be my fault. That right there is a nice treat.

To me, the power going out is like a free, safe holiday. Sure, if I was hooked up to an iron lung, I might feel differently. But as emergencies go, the power going out is the best. Beats the heck out of a tsunami or a military insurrection.

I like how quiet things get when there's no power. The
whir
of the air-conditioner, the soft gurgle of the water heater, the barely perceptible
zizzzing
of all your big and little appliances—it all just stops. Suddenly your house is just your house: four walls and a roof holding in you and your family, and air. It's a refreshingly existential experience. All you have is each other. (And the sound of ice cream melting in your freezer.) You have nothing to do but talk, and see each other anew. You can imagine what it must have been like before all our devices stole our attention. You can almost hear everything sighing, enjoying a much needed moment to breathe.

And then, as it always does, the power comes back. The
whirring
and
zizzzing
begins again, and life returns to normal. But for an instant, as everything kicks back into gear, I catch myself wishing the power had stayed off just a little longer. Because it's in those quiet moments that I realize that what makes the house zizzz isn't the electricity or all the machines and gizmos we clutter our days with. It's the people inside the house. It's the ones you love that make your house hum.

And it was with this recognition that I steeled myself for the day last summer when both my boys were going away to summer camp for the first time, leaving my wife and me alone with nothing but four walls, a roof, and a symphony of electric humming and zinging. I dreaded the silence.

EVER HEARD THE CLICHÉ
“A home without the sounds of children is just a house”? Well, to that I would like to say: “Yes, but it sure is a nice place to
read the friggin' newspaper in peace and quiet
!” It sure is a lovely opportunity to have a conversation without forty-seven interruptions. To eat a meal without someone discovering new ways to make milk disgusting. To not jump to mop up spilled juice. To not cringe at the sound of someone small crashing into something hard and unyielding. To not have to threateningly count backward from three to get the TV turned off. To not bark the words “He asked you to stop, so just stop!” To not have to answer questions you either don't know the answer to or can't answer because it will lead to a hundred more questions you don't feel like answering . . . The whole thing is just a delightful change of pace.

This surprised me, I have to say. I couldn't believe the unabashed glee with which my wife and I skipped about the house; the thrill of finding ourselves alone for the first time in . . . seemingly forever.

And we had charted out some pretty ambitious plans for ourselves. We were going to eat
whatever
we wanted
whenever
we wanted. We would watch every show we had recorded but never managed to actually see. We were going to prance naked in parts of the house heretofore unaccustomed to our nakedness. A second honeymoon is what we had here. And much more deserved than the first one, really, because what were we running away from back then? A few consecutive meals with parents and friends? An awaiting pile of obligatory thank-you notes? The returning of a few rented tuxedos? That was nothing.
This
honeymoon was deserved. After months on end of school, homework, scheduling appointments, playdates, pickups, drop-offs . . . the zizzz and whir of life, we'd
earned
this. The chance to be an actual loving couple for a few blessed weeks.

So with a quick check of the email to see that the kids arrived safely at camp, we were off. Mom and Dad's first time at Camp “How Great Is This?” was under way.

Admittedly, it took a little getting used to. It was an odd sensation, for example, to realize we didn't have to constantly check the time. It didn't matter that it was after nine; no one had to get to bed. We didn't have to talk in code or lower our voices to volumes audible only to each other and certain breeds of dogs; there was no one else there. We could do whatever we wanted. Crazy things. Like go out for a coffee and come back whenever we felt like it! It was a New World, I tell you. And I liked it.

Till around ten-fifteen. Then it felt really odd. The quiet was unsettling. As we headed upstairs to go to bed (so much for the late nights of reckless abandon we had planned), I went through my nightly lock-down ritual: I checked the doors, checked the windows, and walked by the boys' rooms. That's when it hit me. Not that they weren't in the rooms—I knew that. Not even that I missed them; I'd anticipated that, and even believe that missing the ones you love is not such a terrible thing once in a while. What rocked me completely was realizing that this thing I do every night—stopping by their rooms to make sure they're safe and sound—was clearly more for
me
than for
them
.

Truth be told, on any given night, there's very little that can go wrong between the time they head up for bed and the time they get
into
bed. That end-of-day sign-off, I only now realized, was for
my
benefit. It's what made me feel like a father. It wasn't the
only
thing, of course, but it was a crucial one. It gave me a sense of purpose. Maybe the last thing they saw before they closed their eyes didn't really have to be me, but it filled my heart to think so. I hadn't realized how completely my identity was defined by being the father of my kids. And with no kids around to actually father, what was I? Just a guy shutting off lights and sticking my head into empty rooms.

I loped pathetically to the bedroom to commiserate with my wife. We noted the odd silence. Not that our kids are particularly noisy at this time of night, being sound asleep and all. But still, the fact that they were now being silent somewhere other than across the hall made me sad. And envious. I resented whatever idiot sixteen-year-old counselor it was that got to sleep in the same bunk with them. I was bitter that he didn't even appreciate what he had there. I was like a dumped lover who spends an unhealthy amount of time picturing the ex with the new guy. “He'll never love you like I love you.”

THE DAYS WORE ON.
Like Papillon, I took to making
X
s on the calendar, awaiting the boys' return. My wife and I tried to amuse ourselves out of our newfound funk. We played many rounds of Let's See Who Can Go the Longest Without Talking About the Kids. Neither of us won. How did we live before we had kids? What did we talk about?

My wife reminded me that back then we spent an awful lot of time talking about
when
we would have kids, how
many
kids would we have, what it would be like to raise those kids . . . So even before they were here, we were talking about them. And now that they were gone, we were still talking about them.

“Didn't we ever talk about anything else?” I wondered.

“Once,” my wife reminded me, “we talked about getting new plates.”

I hadn't remembered. So apparently it wasn't that great a conversation.

WITH THE KIDS AWAY,
the air in the house felt stale. Stagnant. The absence of chaos bordered on the creepy. There were no socks or quickly discarded basketball shorts draped over every other piece of furniture. Seeing toys neatly lined up on shelves instead of thrown all over the floor blocking any pedestrian passage now seemed simply
wrong
.

I remembered a friend sharing that the only time he ever lost his temper with his kids was when he stepped out of the shower and landed on a plastic yellow dinosaur, piercing his foot on the thing's tail. (In all fairness, it was a pterodactyl, which, in case you're not familiar, is known specifically for tail sharpness and rigidity. A brontosaurus tail, for example, would have likely been a non-issue.)

He continually harangued his kids about leaving toys lying about the floor. And now that his kids were out of the house and in college, he confessed to me, he regularly cursed the silence and the tidiness, and longed for nothing more than to once again step on a yellow dinosaur.

Now I knew what he was talking about; I was missing the dinosaurs. I tried tossing some toys and comic books willy-nilly around the floor, but it rang false; I wasn't kidding anybody. I couldn't match the authentic state of havoc my boys regularly produce with, literally, no effort.

I noticed that with the kids out of the house, even our dog was not himself. From the first moment he saw the duffel bags and sleeping bags come out, he knew something was up. I don't know if all dogs share this sensitivity to luggage, but our dog consistently falls into a pathetic melancholy whenever we so much as take down the suitcases. He instantly does the math: “Suitcase equals packing, packing equals leaving, and whoever those bathing suits and sunscreen are for, pretty sure it ain't me.” What kills me, though, is the immediate and surprisingly mature resolve with which he accepts his impending abandonment. And, since dogs don't generally have a strong understanding of the calendar, they don't really know how long two weeks is. Or, for that matter, that there even is such a thing as a “week.” As far as I can tell, dogs register only “here” and “not here.” I would imagine they envision every departure to be the final one. Why would they assume anyone's ever coming back?

All the more impressive, then, that when he does see us pack to leave, our dog offers no significant protestations. No barking, like when he gets stuck in the garage. No whimpering, like when he wants your chicken. When he saw my boys pack for camp, there was just a slight cock of the head followed by a breathy, mournful sigh, bemoaning his inability to forestall the inevitable—not that different, come to think of it, from the sound my mother made when I went off to college. (Unlike my dog, however, I don't believe my mother then sank to the floor, laid her chin between her two extended arms, and stared at the bottom of the couch for nine hours. Though, again, I wasn't there to see, so . . . who knows?)

WITH HIS HUMAN BROTHERS
out of the house, the dog definitely registered specific, tangible loss. There were far fewer belly rubs, far fewer playful romps and high-speed walks. There were half as many beds to share and half as many people who might potentially be shamed into dropping chicken.

My own sense of loss continued to reveal itself.

Flipping channels, for example, I realized that while I was now free to enjoy shows of my liking for far longer than I would normally, not having the boys there to persuade and convert made it less worthwhile. Stumbling across a Jerry Lewis/Dean Martin movie, for example, it was a refreshing treat to not have to fend off a chorus of “Uch, Daddy, it's black-and-white—it's so boring! Change it.” But I also didn't have the challenge and sweet victory of getting them to love it.

As the days wore on, I began to realize that what I missed maybe more than anything was exactly that: my children's excitement.

From day one, your world is about trying to excite your children. You make funny noises to their face. You dangle red plastic keys over the crib for their amusement. Now,
you
know and
I
know the red key is not that great a toy; it's a piece of cheap plastic in the shape of a key. But
they
don't know that. They've never seen it before. It's fantastic. And
you
must be quite the aficionado for having such a thing in the first place, let alone the generosity of spirit to share it with them.

And childhood is an endless parade of more of the same. You point out the pretty truck, the picture of the clown, the cow in the field, the guy dressed up like Mickey Mouse . . . they love it all. And they love you for showing it to them. And you love it all because your children are happy, and you've helped facilitate that happiness. Everything is firing on all cylinders and life is grand. Until it's not.

There's a carnival near our house at the end of every summer. The kids love that carnival. They love the rides, the games, the noise, the once-a-year-ness of it, the tradition of it, the anticipation of it . . . everything.

A few months ago, we drove by the site, and with customary excitement, I pointed out, “Hey guys—two more months to the carnival!” There was a beat of silence, and then, just realizing it themselves, they both said, “You know what? I think I'm not really into the carnival anymore.” My heart sunk. Obviously I didn't care about the carnival myself. I never even liked it. But I felt a crushing loss that it no longer excited
them
. (Never mind that now I had to come up with something new to dangle for their amusement.)

They had outgrown the carnival. As they should, I suppose. You wouldn't want your kid to still be fascinated with the shiny red plastic key when he's in high school. In time, almost everything will lose its appeal. In this case, my children had digested everything the carnival had to offer and, I'm guessing, come to see it for what it was: a dirty, dusty lot jammed tight with crappy rides operated by toothless, joyless, vagabond carnies, moving, most likely, one step ahead of the law. Perhaps I overstate, but you get the point: it's just a lot of silly, noisy, artificial distraction. There's nothing really to it.