The Other Side of the Nest: A Bird Launcher's tale by Melissa Reitman

As the oldest member of the FL&B team, one of the facilitators referred to me as an elder. Surely, she meant someone else! She wasn't wrong. And maybe that's exactly why I'm writing this. Not to frighten you, but because as someone who has already walked this road I have something to say about its twists and turns.

I spent decades being needed, really needed, in the specific and relentless way that only motherhood demands. Then slowly, bit by bit, year by year, one day I wasn't. My life looked the same. And yet it was so very different.

I have gone on memory rides through Durango. Past the old neighborhood, past the places that hold the shape of a life we shared and I laugh and I cry hearing their voices in the nooks and crannies we visited throughout the years. Not because something went wrong, but because something was real.

I know it might sound strange and far away to you, reading this while you're in the thick of it: surviving on broken sleep, your body and your time are not entirely your own, your heart so full it's almost unbearable. You might be thinking, you would give anything for some quiet time alone. I hear you. That's real too.

But here's what I want you to know from this side of the nest, it starts long before they leave. They begin the work of learning how to fly before the placenta is detached. Every milestone is bittersweet. Every accomplishment carries both joy along with an ache beneath the celebration. Babies become toddlers. Toddlers grow into adolescents. Adolescents become young adults. And young adults become independent people whose need for their mother changes dramatically. Notice I said changes, not disappears!  That's exactly how it's supposed to go. And it still brings conflicting emotions every single time. I am certain you have already experienced this: growing out of baby clothes, the first tooth, the first smile, the first crawl, every first is accompanied with joy, relief and grief simultaneously.  All the while, navigating the challenge of letting each feather grow and each wing expand still loving them the same as you witness their growth into independence. I implore you not to lose sight of your own independence along the way.          

The love doesn't shrink when they leave. It just has nowhere to go for a while. That deep connection, that pull of invisible heartstrings, never disappears. It simply learns to live alongside their growing independence, and yours.

The grief of an empty nest is quiet, deafeningly quiet. But the grief of their leaving and the happiness and pride of their accomplishments can live in the same body at the same time, and all are telling the truth.

There is a question I had never contemplated before, who am I to them now? The role I had occupied so completely, for so long, no longer fits the same way. I am still their mother. That never changes. But what that means, what it looks like day to day, is something I find myself renegotiating all the time. When do I offer and when do I wait to be asked? When is my opinion welcome and when is it an intrusion? How do I stay close without hovering, stay present without crowding the life they are building without me at the center of it? What does a friendship look like with my now grown-up children when my Mothering heart still beats so profoundly for them. I don't always get it right, but I am learning that this new relationship, the one between a mother and her adult child, is one of the most nuanced and tender things I have ever tried to navigate. It asks me to love them in a new language I am still learning to speak.

You will get here someday. You’re already on your way. And when you do, I hope you give yourself permission to feel all of it, pride, disorientation, and yes, the grief. It means you have loved well.