The Children Are Coming...The Children Are Coming

A little over a year ago, I whined to anyone who would listen about how devastated I was when my younger daughter departed for college, leaving my husband and me with an empty nest. It’s hard to say this aloud, much less put it out there in writing, but I now have to confess that I don’t miss my kids. I don’t miss their clothes draped over the furniture, wet towels on the bathroom floor, inability to put dirty dishes into the dishwasher, lack of advance planning, limitless ability to spend money and hugely annoyed tones of voice when I happen to comment upon any of the above.

I don’t miss them as condescending young adults, quarrelsome teens, moody preteens, or temperamental little ones. I might possibly miss them a teensy bit as very small babies in the magical few moments after they started sleeping through the night and before they were old enough to whine, throw tantrums in the supermarket, make fart noises with their armpits, utter the words ”It’s not fair,” refuse to eat what’s served for dinner, fight about bedtime, think that if a joke is funny once, it must also be funny five hundred times later, and do any and all of the myriad other aggravating things that accompany each developmental stage. I don’t miss having to exercise the superhuman and entirely unnatural patience it takes to be a parent.

I don’t miss my kids when they aren’t around and, be honest, I bet you don’t miss your kids either.

It is mid-August, and children are returning to Scarsdale. Our village will once again shed its resemblance to a post-apocalyptic world in which everyone between the ages of 8 and 17 has been vaporized. Summer camp is ending, and teen tours are disembarking at JFK. Our legacy is returning to town and it is hard not to be ambivalent.

People in the rest of the world, the nation, the state, or even the county don’t necessarily ship their kids out for seven weeks every July and August. We do, and so do some fortunate folks in Miami, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, LA, and Buenos Aires. Even those parents among us who claim to regret the wholesale migration of our kids to Maine, New Hampshire, and Europe, nonetheless pay the tuition, label the tee shirts, and ship the duffels with a mounting sense of liberation as departure day draws near. Once we get rid of them for the first time at age 8 or 9 or 10, and they and we survive the experience, most of us can’t wait for the chance to get rid of them again.

The first time we send them off, we tell ourselves that camp will be good for them. And it turns out that, for the most part, camp is good for them. But their fun and the ways in which they mature away from us are not what make summer camp a luxury that we treat as a necessity. As good as a summer away is for our children, it is even better for us, their parents.

I can’t say with certainty what my kids miss about me when they are not home, but what they don’t miss about me is pretty damn obvious. It’s all in the eye of the beholder. I inquire (nag), offer (push), suggest (boss), comment (judge), and otherwise generally frustrate them as we try to navigate the treacherous waters of parent and child occupying the same space at the same time. I have long been exhausted by all that I do feel that I have to do, most of which is wrong in their eyes, and I now know myself to be relieved by their absence and restored by how much they love me and I love them when they are gone.

We work hard to become muscle-hard and match-ready to raise our kids according to whatever record breaking standard we set for ourselves. How many of us have felt like a pro at the stage of childhood or adolescence that has just ended, and a complete neophyte as to the challenges we are about to confront? We scramble to get up to speed, to whip our skill sets into shape as we buy advice books, attend parenting groups, confer with counselors, and take comfort from friends whose children have also transformed them in a matter of seconds from rational adults into screaming nutcases.

And then we quickly we tumble out of shape between parenting one child and the next. The ferocity with which we take on the issues the first time through doesn’t necessarily sustain us the second or third time we go out to run the race. “No, you may not watch three hours of TV, have candy for dinner, go to the mall alone, see a PG-13 movie (at age 6), or ride in a car with your friend who got his/her license yesterday/last week/last month,” somehow morph into fuzzier responses for a younger child.

How do we soften up so fast, when it has taken us years to get in shape in the first place? Maybe we persuade ourselves that, since the oldest child survived the scary parts of growing up, the younger ones will make it too. Possibly, we stop trying to compete to be the best parents, with the best children, because after a very short while we just don’t care about what other people think about us or our offspring. Mostly, I think, we get really, really tired.

I don’t have much parenting muscle anymore. In addition to being the mother of two college age women, I am grandma to three kids, ages five, eight, and ten. My younger daughter is only nine years older than my older grandson, which is another way of saying that I am not that far removed from my days of daily parenthood workouts. Nonetheless, I am woefully out of shape, a fact that was brought home to me last month when our three grandkids spent a week with my husband and me, without their parents.

It was grandparent boot camp. We raced around from morning until nighttime, trying to keep the kids entertained away from home, their friends, and their routines. By the end of the week, or to be frank, about midway through, we were all totally fried. That’s when the grandkids let down their guard and started freely misbehaving and my husband and I had to figure out if we still have the right stuff. We don’t.

We found ourselves digging our nails into our thighs as the kids roared in the back seat of the car. We couldn’t summon up the energy to employ the diversionary tactics we used when our own kids were small a few short years ago. After spending decades sticking a metaphorical sock in my mouth so that I didn’t use vulgarisms or curse words in front of my young daughters, I didn’t manage to get through six days of grandparenting before I heard myself say an expletive that would be bleeped on network television. A couple of hours later, my husband ostentatiously read emails on his blackberry while the kids took turns “tooting” noisily and intentionally (who knew this could be accomplished on cue?) to the horror of every other patron of an ice cream parlor because he didn’t feel, and wasn’t inclined to fake, the moral indignation required to shut down their scatological shenanigans. It’s a good thing we have those kids to ourselves for only one week a year. That’s just about how long we can hold it together, and we need the following 51 weeks to recover.

So, no, I don’t miss my kids when they are at college, or my grandkids when they are at home. I enjoy them – mostly anyhow – during our times together and then I enjoy the relaxation that follows their departure when I don’t have to be a parent or grandparent every moment of every day. You must know this too, as your kids are invading your home again, coming back from camp or trips, sucking up all the available oxygen that, for a few short weeks this summer, fueled your dinners out, your quiet Sundays reading the paper, your chance to watch R-rated movies, your guilt-free tennis matches and rounds of golf, and your opportunity to reconnect with the part of yourself that is not a mom or a dad.

Take heart. Love and enjoy them while they are home. You only have to survive 45 weeks until they leave again.

Stacey Brodsky has practiced law, taught middle school English and been a stay-at-home mom during the 18 years she, her husband and her children have lived in Scarsdale.