Many of my contemporaries are or have become empty nesters of late. I wrote this fictional piece in their honour.

For 25 years, I hadn’t known there were creaks in our home. The deafening noise of children playing and kids growing masked them.

I am an empty nester and I am lost. Recently my daughter, the last of five children, started university in London, Ont. My husband and I helped her set up the place she rented. We laughed the whole way there.

Coming back was different though.

Somehow in our small hatchback, we found our own corners as soon as we hit the Highway 401 and mostly stayed there for what seemed like hours. Our little girl was not in the back seat. She would be away for four years and likely would never move back into our home. I couldn’t stop crying.

We drove up the driveway, and my husband turned the ignition off. The car rolled slightly and then stopped abruptly when he pulled the emergency brake. I looked at him, wondering if he was OK.

He was crying. Tears were rolling down his cheeks. I hadn’t seen him cry for many years, actually since his father’s shivah. As it was so uncommon to see that side of him, I shivered a bit and coldness set in at not feeling so safe any longer.

I opened the car door and stepped out. I was still in my corner, and in some way, some strange way, I resented my husband.

“Let’s have another child,” I had said to him when our youngest had turned three.  “Five is not a lot you know. The Goldmans have eight children and were grandparents when they had their last one.”

“It’s smart,” I said, “so we’ll never be alone.”

My husband looked at me with unhappiness in his eyes and said, “Alone? We’ll have each other.”

I was 50 and I wanted to make another child. I didn’t want the two of us to be alone, even though we had tickets for the theatre and Leafs and Raptors games, and a membership to Beth Torah Congregation. It wasn’t enough though. I am a mother and I want so badly to nurture, and it’s not enough from an occasional distance.

My husband got out of the car and I  asked, “Why are you crying? Isn’t this what you always wanted?”

He responded that it was, but he never realized that he actually dreaded this moment.

“I was so tired of driving the boys to their hockey games, bar mitzvah lessons and to concerts,” he continued.

“I couldn’t wait to go to bed when I wanted, not having to wait up for the girls, and to wake up later, instead of having to prepare breakfast for everyone on the weekends.”

He continued that he was too young to be an empty nester and the next stop was being a grandparent, something that made him feel decrepit.

The next day, our rabbi commiserated with us, but he was too young to appreciate what we were going through. His oldest was six. We called our friends who had become empty nesters two years earlier and they were busy playing golf. A week, month, year went by. Pesach came, and the family was together, and eight days later they were gone.

A few years passed. Our daughter got married, then she got divorced. Then she moved back home. We’ve asked her to shovel the snow, hoping she would get the point. She’s hasn’t. The house seems so terribly full.

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