To the Empty Nesters - Notches

There is another area of deception people walk through. Life seen in a linear way, that has notches on it, describing “and here you have children” and the line moves on to “and here you say good-bye for the first time”, as they are left sobbing at daycare, or running up the steps to face their first day of school and not looking back. Yet, you know they’re coming back home to tell you all about their busy day.

The years roll on, notches come and go, in a happy, mother-buzz, reinforcing and fluffing up areas of the nest that require attention.

Just when she is at her peak of performance, being a role model for her children; just when it all seems a forever well-oiled process of life; just when she feels a happiness vicariously drawn from her children’s lives, via crayons and tea parties and dress-up, thus bringing connection to her own youth-time; just when….. – and you can fill in the blanks here, - she finds herself giving that good-bye hug she needs to give, that holding of them just one more time, after thousands – fewer, and far between.

A good mother in this world is almost a Greek tragedy figure, and here’s how and why:
A girl begins and grows in glorious freedom until she learns that every month for many decades she will bleed an unused egg for several days, prior to and during which she will suffer painful cramps. She learns that she must not be as carefree as boys get to be. She has to be careful around boys, or a boy. She is learning she is an object and must be protective of herself.

She learns that she should, and must, look a certain way – hair, clothing, weight, height, facial feature ratios; she must walk a certain way, behave a certain way. “Natural” only applies to flavorings in food.

If she gets through the labyrinth of her second decade, then she is faced making choices regarding career, marriage, family. All of a sudden life is fraught with demands, concerns, burdens and a sense of loss. Indeed, for there is loss.

She comes to love someone who loves her back and there is a new comfort zone that promises more than it can deliver. All around her are others her age in the same state, so it’s all okay then.

There is a descent into the hell of deception. She turns her back on her creative talents and skills, hopes and dreams and plans – and an egg in her receives its seed.

She is young, yet adult, adjusting to the physical changes and hormonal wackiness. What is coming on a broader scale on this linear path is still too far off and gray-haired to even consider and that feels safe.

A big deal goes on for months about what color to paint baby’s room, the decorations, the cute, tiny clothing, the blankets, the equipment, and what to name the baby’s youtube channel. A regular Hollywood production, this fluffing of momma’s nest.

Her last moments as center-of-attention are drawing to a close, and at the first cry, not of hers, but of the baby’s, all attention shifts away. From that point on, she’d better learn to let go entirely of her ‘self’. She’s no longer important except in the fulfilling of her family’s needs and family obligations.

Oh, I know, there’s a whole swirl of life going on that I’m not bringing out. I am trying to stay at the core of the girl’s life. We say in a romantic way – “oh, yes, her heart beats for her family” – no in actuality it beats to keep her going here. It knows nothing of what has gone on in the daylight all these years. It began and developed in the darkness of a womb and was enclosed before the light of day appeared to the infant’s eyes.

That said, she chooses to yield her life to love for her child.

Happily she gets to dress up baby, like she learned to do when playing with her dolls, when playing mommy was fun, until she got bored with that and left the doll wherever until whenever.

There are moments in life when deep inside us there is a mourning, a sudden sadness of awareness that we have lost the earlier dreams and hopes for our own lives - that we have lost ourselves in the choices we thought we were supposed to make. We bargained, we gambled – and the prize we won we cannot return for what we really wanted. There is a growing realization of the deceptions in this world – dressed up and shiny, glowing attractively to the youth’s eye mesmerized by tinsel and plastic. The images presented before us all say ‘the world understands and will admire you – IF you look this way, act that way, talk like this….. blithely stay in your happy place, aka keeping quiet and causing no trouble.

Some girls sadly already fit into such images; most do not and never will; so girls learn that they must spend vast amounts of time and money to achieve acceptability, credibility, respectability, desirability, dignity; only to find, and fund, their own futility.

Some women descend into despair over the awakening of this deception, and continue the descent. Others make a shift in their lives to wrest back some talent they had that brought them great joy when younger; it appeases their sorrow, and expands to a fuller life bringing some balance even to their family’s awareness.

Mothers’ homes re-fluffed, reinforced and re-lined many times through their years, to accommodate their children’s needs and to bring a sense of fulfillment to themselves, become echo chambers that re-sound through the day until everyone’s return. Yet, one by one, beginning in Middle School and High School, the symphony of family melodies reverberates less and less.

Mother busies herself with other activities and entertaining. But the light of day does not soften the silence, it heightens it. In the halls of this building she glimpses that a theft has occurred, that what to believe anymore is merely a narcotic to keep her, no “it all”, going; that her worth is measured not by what she is but by what she can do for everybody else – excluding her own soul’s deep hunger and thirst.

She has kept her family and others warm, fed, feeling cared about, included. Yet, in a flash, she sees, she has starved, dehydrated, malnourished, left out in the cold, and turned a cold shoulder to her own soul – her own needs for which she now feels guilty to consider.

Robots are programmed to talk and move in a way that accomplishes specific pre-programmed tasks. Their words can be helpful-sounding, kind-sounding, caring-sounding. Their heart is a battery. Their mind is computer chips. Humans are not robots. Humans are not polymers and plastic and wires. Humans don’t need a lube and oil change every 5000 miles!

Sooner than wanted comes the day when to the first child she says that final, yet every day, “good-bye”, and he or she, having eagerly preened their wings for flight for their own life, lifts off, as mother watches the last moments of feet at nest’s edge, in slow motion separate forever from that invisible cord that attaches mother from her own memories of “when” many notches ago; a poignant reminder of how it felt to lift off – the unknown strength of her own wings, the invisible, merciful loft beneath them, the height and full sky ahead calling her to all of life’s possibilities, and for which she sighs in secret; and also separates them from her right to assert unbidden authority, to only asked-for wisdom. She is thrilled for her child, she remembers her own child-self, she sorrows for her child’s coming sorrows.

The wise woman will not allow the world to tell her who and what she is, and isn’t, what she should have done and not done, what she is and isn’t capable of, what she is allowed say and not allowed to say. What right does the deceiver of this world have to imprison societies to unrealistic standards?

The wisdom of the elders is not only from the unfoldment of experience, but from awakening to the deceiver’s lies. Wisdom in the young in a society is to be highly desired; but the world trivializes elders’ wisdom, perpetuating its loop of lies in the eyes of immaturity.

The girl-mother, forced to shift the gears of her being begins a search for her own life again – her own authenticity.

She will find that all her heart and soul desires, and ever did desire – and ever will desire even more in the years and the changes to come, will be found by walking in The Way – Christ’s path, which not only is straight, but narrow.

This path leads to ever greater potential realized and expanded opportunities for her soul’s larger freedom to be and do. She will face the challenge of the deceiver and with the Lord at her side she will learn to discern between the counterfeit and its counter-fact – the Real Deal – that life is to be spiritually discerned, because God is Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in Truth.

This will lift the burden of mortality to awareness of the ever-present need for life lived – not accomplishing another notch on a linear pre-programmed plane with its dubious beginnings and endings, but as a circle never ending, in eternal fluidity  and expansion.

Always we are needed, always we are free in Him, always He is our life, always there will be something more, and it will be wonderful.

The “village” will always be present, as we are all brothers and sisters in Christ. All we need to do is re-define “nest” and we will see it is always full and we will always be needed and useful, productive, loved, in mutual nurturing. The innocent child within gets to come out and be free again!

And the One Father-Mother, God, of all, will take care of us as he has and will, forever.
Why do we know things, for others, but act and feel like we don’t know them at all for ourselves? The Bible has opened the prison doors – let’s just fly out and be free and live in the eternal, infinite cycles of Life forever full-skied.