Real Families: Reflections on family life

Four years ago we left Youngest Bird at college. At the time I wrote about how empty it was in that nest. Amid concluding Mother Bird Joan and I would be OK, I reported on tears in a silent house. Then by my next column I was confessing that, um, actually we were enjoying loving Departed Birds instead of In-Nest Birds.

I also forecast that birds would be in and out of the nest and that this would be fine, this is the way our culture now is, let’s flex and grow in a world in which they come and go. I didn’t know how true this would be. We had nine months of empty nest. Then some bird has lived with us ever since. We were mostly fine, but Parent Birds would sometimes say with glances at each other, Remember, oh remember, that so sweet and so evanescent empty nest?

Now things are yet more complicated: Last week (as I write this in early May), Youngest Bird finished college. And now, except for Oldest Bird, settled in Olympia, every bird is moving to a new nest.

Middle Bird moved last night. At bedtime a ringing phone shattered the quiet of our first hours of a new empty nest. What now? our looks said. It was Middle Bird. “I love my new life.” OK, we could manage that interruption. And we scratched our heads.

How did this come to be? This was the bird who by her final years in the big city was so traumatized in our increasingly dangerous neighborhood (it seemed to get better after someone torched two of the nearby crack houses) she was one reason we decided to try a different type of nest for a while. Now this, of all birds, was the one who had moved right smack into the big city’s downtown.

Today came another pile of wedding invitation acknowledgments. I don’t open these; even as I celebrate that in Christ there is no male and female, for some reason Youngest and Mother Birds seem more invested in them. But I know what they mean: Youngest Bird will be married soon. And she and our son-to-be will move into their own nest in Virginia.

I am aware of this because for a time we competed for nests. Joan and I also needed a nest in Virginia, because I’ll be living there much of the earlier part of many weeks due to my new job, and she’ll sometimes join me there, even as I’ll often live with her in our old nest much of the later part of many weeks. So for months Youngest and Parent Birds were trying to get an apartment in the exact same area. When one day we found ourselves exploring the same apartments, Youngest Bird was unhappy with my thinking that if we wanted the same one, whoever got to it first got it.

There was also the wedded couple’s hope to build a new life away from parents. My taking a job in the same town caused consternation. No problem, I stressed, I’d not eat every meal with them. Youngest Bird assured me I could live in their doghouse.

So here we are. Our primal nest emptied as never before, birds scattered to the winds. Once more there is sorrow. There are the memories, precious memories, longing-filled memories of those few fleeting decades we were all in one place. There is the stretching of our love across old nest and apartment nest Joan and I will need to work at.

There are also the signs that home is more than being together in a nest. This matters, because if home is only about the nest, then not only we but countless ones of us are doomed to homesickness.

But a few weeks ago, Mother Bird moved heaven, earth and airline schedules so that all of us achieved a miracle: 24 straight hours together. We went to the shore, checked into our hotel and too soon were apart once more. Yet for those few hours we lived in kairos—the fullness of time, God’s time, time richer and deeper than the ticking minutes—and Home.

We don’t really know yet how to live in Home, spiritual togetherness, when nest as home is more memory than actuality. But we look forward to learning. And we also, poised at the edge of what was and what is to come, can see just how vital to the building of Home—for us, for all humans who long to be more than alone, for a culture so often better at scattering than gathering, for a church seeking ways to help us glimpse the meaning of being in God’s nest—those earlier years of home are.