I watched my friends, one by one, go through the trauma of an empty nest. Stoically waving goodbye to children as they travelled to distant shores to study and follow career paths we'd not even been aware existed; standing empty-pursed after a dream wedding and hoping that two lives would meld into a harmonious couple; planning almost immediately for a trip to visit them and get a feel of their lives and a taste of a different world.
Somewhere between all this, my time, too, came and went. From the busy-ness of a normal household with children and homework, after-games snacks and birthday parties, sleepovers and last-minute dashes to the market in search of pencils and notebooks and uniform socks, I was suddenly thrust into a quiet world of my own company, long walks with no fixed time to return home since there was no one to awaken and feed and hurry to school, long hours of nothing to scrub, with the new luxury of clean floors and clean clothes.
I should have felt at a loose end, lost and alone, I should have started planning my own foray into the familiar world of the children's company, or something else to prove to myself that I was a normal neophyte in the world of empty nests.
Instead, secretly relieved that for two months of holiday time in the distant future, I'd have ten months of a break from the dreary routine, I shut down the kitchen stove, emptied the freezer, closed a couple of rooms to cut down on the time spent on maintenance and kept only a small space available for my needs.
Rest at last, I thought. Now I'll do all the things I promised myself I would - and couldn't each time one of those scraped-knee or forgotten-school-project emergencies arose.
But I hadn't counted on college schedules, mid-term holidays, new friends and new interests - no, not mine, but of the children who were away. Along with once-a-quarter long-distance payment of fees there began almost once-a-week hunts for all the loose change and leftover household money to finance eternally hungry hostelites, digging into pockets and pay cheques so that ATM cards could always have something to withdraw!
And much worse, rifling through recipe books to produce all the goodies that would keep without refrigeration and also keep stomachs of "growing teens" of different tastes and persuasions (vegetarian, non-vegetarian, vegan, 'eggetarian', egalitarian, et al), replete.
All the things I'd promised myself I'd do were now reduced to only one option - back to the workforce. Hunt for a job - and that too a job that gave me enough money to keep the coffers full and enough time to keep the goodies from the kitchen flowing.
A very long shot indeed, but somehow accomplished with the world at that time on an economic upsurge! Along with the new job/jobs, came new friends and acquaintances of my own. Gone were the days of single-minded devotion to home and hearth and the heart of the home - the children. People popped in at odd hours and there was always time for them, phone calls went on far into the night or on my way to and from the office, meals were shared, outings were planned.
In the midst of it all, the children came back - to their old rooms that were no longer the same. Gone were the wrestling posters and the football banners, hidden from view were the Spiderman and Batman figures, books once read were locked in the garage. Slowly, insidiously, like the extra inches to my girth, the extraneous evidence of my existence had taken their place.
The blow-up was inevitable and the blow-out followed. Back came all the possessions of yesteryears to add to those of the present day, in walked the friends of yore with the new, chairs were shared, the table was laden... and the empty nest has made place for more than it held before!
Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.
