I wrote this short essay after two of our three kids left home within a year. I did not know then that they really would come back, that they would come and go, that the pandemic would ground all of the chicks in the nest for a long victory lap of a year. This is the raw truth of how I felt then. It is not how I feel now with an actual empty nest, but it took me time to find myself.

Meaningless, meaningless, all is meaningless. Thus saith the empty nest mom, looking for something to fill that hole because goodness knows there are needs in the world, and people and animals and such aching for someone to take care of them. Except none feels just right. Except I keep trying to do too many such things, and none of them fill the hole that is left behind by the kids.

And then one night when I’m in tears my husband tells me that until I’m enough I won’t find something that has meaning, that I need to be at home with myself, to go deep within. And he is exactly right and I know it, and it’s such a relief because honestly I have had a million ideas, or at least several hundred, and none of them feel like they will satisfy that emptiness I’m feeling inside me, that emptiness that wants my babies home with me at night.

The epiphany comes at precisely the right time, a week before our second child comes home to Canada for American Thanksgiving. I’ve struggled this fall with a quiet house, with having dipped below critical mass in the family department, with only one child left at home, and that child not always keen on me. Every time I have seen our oldest, I have cried afterwards because it’s been a taste of what I crave – mothering – and because it’s so fleeting, so elusive, so almost there I can see it but not have it. It feels like the universe is mean, like I’m being taunted, like a bottle of water behind unbreakable glass.

Tonight what I feel like is that I want them to have their full adventures, their adult lives, their lessons, and then I want them home at night. Because our second child came home for five nights and it was just right. I had so much joy welling up inside of me that I was just full. My Sunday School class – who are nine and ten years old – have been talking this month about thanksgiving and Thanksgiving, and we have talked about giving thanks even when we don’t feel like it. I tell them about my oldest who duly and dutifully thanked relatives for every gift without fault – but when the gifts he loved were unwrapped, his thanks involved squeals and sparkling eyes. That’s what this feels like: I’m figuring out how to have a happy life and I’m working away at it, but when the kids come home, there’s no work involved: it is pure easy joy. And part of me is so angry about this: that all I ask for is what has long been normal life, and now is not. Now, impossibly, my house is too damn quiet. Too horribly empty.

In between the night of my epiphany and now I have had a week of getting it, really getting it, being so at peace with myself, and realizing that this quiet season is a gift, that I am enough, that all shall be well. And then the boy arrived—and he came as a surprise to my husband, and we had planned so many good things while he was here—and it was so good that I made up and sang songs of joy and delight. And it felt just exactly right. And I told myself the whole time, “you are enough. Be at home in yourself. Love him well but he is not your home” and as hard as I tried to keep that voice in mind, it was drowned out by the sheer simple happiness of my boy being home at last, after almost 100 days of being gone.

This boy is quiet and always has been. I didn’t think I would miss him. Our dog is quiet too. He rarely barks, but he is so very present, and our son has been so very absent, and our house has cried out his absence. And nothing will fill that hole.

And while he was here, I took random photos of him, greedy, hungry photos that said I could capture him, I could at least capture that he was here, even if it was short and fleeting. Stop it, he said, in his pyjamas, with the dog, in a Tim Horton’s. But that’s the thing: I ache for the people I love the most, who have been part of my everyday life for so long, just to be part of my everyday life now.  I love the everyday, the normal, the quotidian. I love that more than holidays, more than occasions, more than vacations. I have not felt the need to escape my daily life. I love cleaning my house, the weather, the rhythms of life, the saying hi to neighbours as I walk the dog. My daily life is rich with relationships and meaning. The Bible says of God’s words that we should talk about them as we walk along, write them on our doorposts, tie them as symbols on your hands, talk about them with our kids as we sit at the table. And that is it. Emily in Our Town says, “I love you all, everything. I can’t look at everything hard enough…It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.” The thing is that I know this: as I said in Matthew’s first year, I couldn’t have enjoyed it more and yet it still passed by.

The good part about the epiphany was that I didn’t dread the end of our son’s visit while he was here. But visit. It was only a visit. That’s exactly what’s breaking my heart right now, that maybe it’s a visit, and that when he was here, it felt just right, and this feels just wrong.

How do I do this? My heart is breaking. Our son said home felt so good, that where he is doesn’t feel like home, but he’s there again, and he’ll go back again and again, and I’m left here in an emptying house with a broken heart.