Empty Nest

Is it really an empty nest if the baby birds keep tweeting the mama bird?
Although my kids are all gone to college, I hear from them all most everyday. Sometimes they're sharing happy things; sometimes they're complaining; sometimes they're asking for help.
Being home, just me and Earl, certainly doesn't bother me. We're eating whatever and whenever we want. They range from sophisticated adult meals to quick singles food. Salmon burgers and asparagus, brie and raspberry jam, wine, cereal, French toast, pot pies.
We're scheduled to start dance class in a few weeks, and we're spending time with friends, seeing movies.
Still it isn't all smooth sailing.
Tucker got sick the week before he moved to college, and we've been trying to deal with that long distance. First his jaw became sore and swollen where he had his wisdom teeth out in July. The dentist put him on a strong antibiotic.
Then he started dealing with episodes of racing heart, sweating, feeling faint. The possibilities with those symptoms are many.

Tucker on the left with his roommate.

So he went off to school two weeks ago, and he started to feel worse. He became extremely tired. He felt like he was going to pass out when he climbed the stairs to class. He could hardly keep his eyes open during class.
He took the bus home last Thursday evening so he could see the doctor Friday morning then I drove him back to school in time for his Italian class.
But the doctor didn't test him for mono, which I think should always be the first test with tired college students. I wasn't at the appointment, but the doctor debated things like low blood sugar, thyroid, anxiety. Nothing firm was decided, which is the frustrating part. So we just sent him back to school to continue living and going to classes. I wonder if he feels deserted.
This week he called and said his jaw was swollen again. I guess he didn't take his antibiotics the way he was supposed to, even after I warned him about superbacteria and the need to keep the antibiotics in his system.
Now, after two weeks in school, he texted today and asked if he could take a year off from school.
Gulp.
My knee-jerk reaction is, "No! Stay at school." But I've dealt with rough starts before. I know to keep stringing him along week by week until he gets to the end of the semester, like a kitten chasing yarn.
When he called, here were his arguments:
He isn't sure what he wants to do, so his major is undecided.
It feels a lot more like high school than he thought it would.
He just thinks he'd rather get a job and get his own apartment for a year.
I listened to his reasons and then suggested he give it another week and we re-evaluate next Friday.

Spencer in his new dorm room.

I wonder if the girlfriend here at home has anything to do with the wish to come home. And, of course, I'm afraid if he doesn't stick with it that he'll never finish college.
The good news is that Spencer transferred colleges, and he is only an hour and  half away from home. And he's really in his element. His only difficulty so far is the calculus professor who has
such a thick accent Spencer can't understand him. Spencer wrote down the notes the professor put on the board and took them to the math tutor. The math tutor couldn't decipher them either.
One of his fellow students stopped Spencer and thanked him for asking questions in class. Spencer says he tries to repeat back to the professor what he says in hopes that the professor will clarify. It sounds like Spencer is doing all the right things to be successful.
Grace is enjoying her final semester of college. She's living in a house near campus with three theater friends. She's auditioning for shows and spending time with friends.
She has come home the past few weekends, so our nest isn't empty on the weekend, but it's more like a girlfriend sleepover when Grace is here rather than having kids I have to take care of.
So, yes, my nest is technically empty, but my plate is still definitely full.

Changes

What if you left your life for six months then popped back in. What do you think would be different?
That's kind of what happened for my oldest son Spencer.
I took him back to college on Jan. 3. He arrived home last night.
Life went on, of course.
"Where's the trash can?" he asked turning toward the kitchen corner where the trash can used to be.
We painted that corner of the kitchen and moved the trashcan under the sink.
"Can I take a shower in the downstairs bathroom?" he asked.
"Ask Dad," I told him. "He just caulked it."
"Where is Dad?" he asked. "Still in bed?"
The clock read 11:19 a.m.
When Spencer left for college in January, Earl hadn't switched to working days. When he worked until midnight or 1 a.m., he often slept in (but never until 11).
"No, Spence, Dad is at work." He looked puzzled.
The entire world had shifted while he studied and partied in Florida.
"Can I switch to the basement bedroom when Grace moves into her apartment?" he asked.
"No, Tucker took over that bedroom. You can't kick him out."
When Spencer walked in the door last night, he scooped up one of our cats. "He seems so much calmer," Spencer said to the cat.
Just hang around for a little while and the cat will be skidding back and forth across the wood floors.
Not everything changes.

Ch-ch-ch-Changes

How are you with change?
I'm pretty good with it. This may have something to do with me being shallow. In my adult life, I've moved from city to city about every five years. If we didn't move, I would get a little antsy, like I needed something new, something different.
That has faded some as I get older. We've been in Columbus now 15 years! But we have lived in three different  houses in three different parts of the city.

Grace is exhausted by change even at age 1.

My daughter Grace hates change, but she's working on it. The other day I had an epiphany and called to tell her why she hates change. We lived in four different houses before her 1st birthday. That's the year we moved from Sebring, Florida to Tampa, Florida then Jackson, Michigan where we lived in an apartment for a few months before closing on our first house and moving into it. Four houses and the chaos that goes with it probably led to her aversion to change.
Our household has dealt with recent changes as first Grace, then Spencer graduated high school and marched off to faraway colleges. Grace accepted change once again when she transferred to a college closer to home.
But in the coming year, we'll face an even bigger change, not just Tucker graduating and going off to college, but Earl's work schedule is changing.
Earl has been working evenings for nearly five years.
It was on Tucker's 13th birthday that we learned the newspaper would have layoffs. We held our breath to see if Earl would lose his job. Luckily, he didn't, but he did move jobs from assistant city editor to copy editor. We felt fortunate that he would have a job at all with the way the newspaper business was going. And the company left his salary the same. All he lost was a free parking space.

Tucker at age 13.

The new job as copy editor required Earl to work evenings rather than days. In his previous job, he'd go in to work at 10 a.m. and come home at 8 or 9 p.m.
When he switched, five years ago, he started to work 3-11 p.m. or 4-midnight, sometimes even 5 p.m. to 1 a.m.
From the time Tucker was 13, Earl has been absent in the evenings. Now as Tucker begins the downhill slide to 18 and his last semester of high school, Earl will switch to day times again and begin working as a reporter.
He's okay with moving to the reporter position. Working as a copy editor was good because he worked his eight hours then came home and put it behind him. As a reporter, the job won't go away quite that easily. He may work longer hours and he may continue to do work at home, but he will be here in the evenings.
That may mean I have to fight for the remote on the nights that The Bachelor or The Amazing Race air. That probably means I'm going to see a lot more old movies or specials on airplanes on television.

Hottie Juan-Pablo appears on The Bachelor
 starting in January.

I'll  probably need to start making dinner regularly too. Between me and Tucker, I sometimes make a pot of macaroni and cheese or bake a pizza that he can eat whenever he gets hungry. With my husband home, I'm probably going to feel obligated to cook real meals again.
Things will change for Tucker too. When he got old enough to drive, he started coming home from school for lunch. Since I teach college, sometimes I am home and sometimes not, but Earl is almost always home. He cooks grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup for Tucker, or slathers peanut butter and jelly between slices of bread. Tucker then takes his lunch and turns on ESPN for his 30-minute lunch.
This Wednesday, I had a meeting at 11:30. Earl had a meeting too.
At 11:47, my phone rang.
"Where is everybody?" Tucker asked.
I explained the meeting situation and then told Tucker he'd better get used to it since Earl moved to days in January and I was scheduled to work at least 3 days during the week.
"Do you mean I'm going to have to make my own lunch?" Tucker asked.
"That's how it looks," I said.
I knew Earl never should have started making Tucker's lunch. Now he's just looking for a handout every day at noon.
I'm sure we'll all get through the changes coming our way. Until then, I'm keeping the remote and I'll probably make sure Tucker gets lunch through next week anyway.

Changes

My daughter is averse to change. It sends her into a tizzy, and many times, I think I'm not the right kind of mom for her. I have inadequate amounts of patience for her angst.
So the beginning of a new year with the beginning of a new decade were traumatic. Around nine o'clock New Year's eve, she was preparing to leave the party I was at and go to another party. She hugged me and said, "I'm not ready for 2010."
"Well," I said, taking a sip of my pina colada, "you've got another three hours to get ready."
See, probably not too comforting.
2010 is the year she turns 18 and joins the "adult" world. She must picture me with a big pair of scissors cutting the knot between us. She will become adrift in the adult world, forced to make every decision for herself. My mother tells me she hated turning 18 too, so maybe it's genetic.
2010 is the year Grace will graduate from high school and go off to college. These are things to embrace, but she clings to her life, afraid of what may come.
The next morning she was bemoaning that a whole decade had passed. I suppose she may have been old enough to remember New Year's of 2000 when she was 7, almost 8.
"Look," I told her. "You've accomplished so much in the past decade."
Her big eyes looked up, begging me to list her achievements.
"You kept trying out for parts at OperaColumbus until you landed one with the children's chorus. You're in Singers. You do solos at all of the performances. You got a big part in the play and in the upcoming musical. You learned to Irish step dance and continued ballet until you were 12. You can ride a horse and jump the horse, plus you won ribbons for it."
Grace and her dance partner perform at the Ohio Statehouse.
I continued to think of all the things she'd done in the past 10 years. Sailing and swimming and geography bees. Switching from home school to high school was painful, but she has succeeded.
"The only time you need to look back on a decade and regret that it's gone is if you are still in the same place you were when it started," I said.
"If you are sitting at the kitchen table in front of our laptop the morning of 2020 then you need to rethink your decade," I said, looking at her in front of the smooth wood table.
She smiled, a wry smile.
She seemed not to hate the new decade as much and I hope eventually she'll be able to embrace changes, at least the good ones that move her life forward inch by inch.