We’ve had a rough week. Three funerals (my husband is a minister), a close friend confessing an adulterous relationship, a torn tendon, a sinus infection, and we had to “put down “ our favorite horse--all while trying to pack to leave for a mission trip to Africa. I’m not surprised at all that’s happened. Life often tends to get intense right before we leave town. It’s easy to get discouraged and wonder if “this trip is worth it” or to become disappointed by the behavior of someone whom you so admired. Life is full of disappointments and discouragements. These are two of our enemy––Satan’s––best tools because they are so subtle.
Good friends prayed for us this morning and in the process we were reminded of the great holiness of God. As we held hands in a small circle and prayed, we felt that we were standing on Holy Ground. We focused on how Big and Powerful and Holy is our Lord. Shifting our eyes from ourselves and our situations back onto His majesty puts everything else into perspective. He understands our feelings, but He’s not thrown by them, and He is stronger than the enemy’s tools of discouragement and disappointment.
My “babies,” our twenty-nine-year-old twin daughters, Susy and Libby, were home with their first babies, one four months and one fourteen months. Watching my girls nurse their babies, coo sweetly at them, and respond knowingly to each distinct cry, I visualized myself doing the same thing not too long ago even though it was forever ago! And I wished my mother was here to see my girls with their babies. My Mom was killed instantly in an automobile accident five years ago, and even though I take comfort in the fact that she never suffered and that she’s with the Lord whom she adored, I know she would have loved being here in the center, watching her great-grands and observing the awe on the faces of their mothers. How I wish she was here to share these precious moments with me.
I believe there’s an unusual interconnectedness between generations of women. The older I get, the more I think of my mother and grandmothers. Looking back I wonder what they thought about their lives. I wish I knew more of the things they experienced. I wish they were here so that I could ask them questions that I didn’t think of when they were alive. I long to be able to thank them for things they did that I didn’t appreciate at the time! And then my thoughts turn to generations in the other directions—my children and their kids and one day my great-grandchildren––the fears, dreams and prayers I have for them.
A friend sent me an article recently from the New York Times titled, “Your Nest Is Empty? Enjoy Each Other” by Tara Parker-Pope, January 19, 2009.
In the article, the author reports that empty nesters are happier in their marriages than they were when the children were home. And I agree. It’s been true for us (see my post “Like a Beautiful Old Building,” January 27, 2009). Ms. Parker-Pope writes:
The empty nest may not be such an unhappy place after all. Researchers at Berkeley tracked marital happiness among 72 women in the Mills Longitudinal Study, which has followed a group of Mills College alumnae for 50 years. The study is important because it tracks the first generation of women to juggle traditional family responsibilities with jobs in the work force.
In the empty-nest study, researchers compared the women’s marital happiness in their 40s, when many still had children at home; in their early 50s, when some had older children who had left home; and in their 60s, when virtually all had empty nests. At every point, the empty nesters scored higher on marital happiness than women with children still at home.
For some time I have adopted the habit of choosing one character trait of our God to focus on each day. Usually I ask God to remind me of one first thing in the morning before I even get out of bed. Today I’ve been thinking about the fact that our God is an attentive God.
He pays attention to every detail. He notices when one sparrow falls; He numbers the hairs on my head; He forms us (and our children and grandchildren) in our mother’s womb; He knows all my thoughts. He reveals his attentiveness in every bit of creation from the most delicate flower to the funniest animal. When I contemplate His attentiveness, I find I experience more of His peace because I remember that there is nothing that He cannot see, nothing of which He is unaware. So surely He is aware of my concern for a relationship, a child, a decision. He is pure love and I can trust Him. He will not overlook anything.
My good friend, Jane Ann Smith, who also has six children and is about ten years ahead of me in life’s journey, has given me lots of good advice over the years. Now in our empty nest years, I continue to learn from her.
Last year as Susan and I were writing our empty nest book, I emailed her for her thoughts on what she was learning in the empty nest. Her response was well thought out and as always very wise.
She wrote, “I had just survived a big conflict with one of my children and a friend told me that I needed to learn to become smaller in my family. I had become “big” in my family because my doctor husband had been gone a lot and my six children needed me. I had become a controller without even knowing when it happened.”
“Almost 45 years later, with all the children grown, I was still way too big in their lives. They still expected me to treat the wounds and fix broken things, and when I couldn’t, some of them resented it and me. And I couldn’t imagine not being a part of their lives.”
“As I prayed about how to do this “becoming smaller”, God showed me that I didn’t need to talk so much.
Have you ever found that when you ponder the past your thoughts run to “if-only”? Or when you consider the future your imagination tends toward “what-if”? Whereas if-only brings about regret, what-if produces fear. Neither is healthy or productive. Yet remembering is good! The Old Testament is full of remembering. The key is in noticing what God’s children remembered.
In Deuteronomy 32 Moses says to the children of Israel, “Remember the days of old . . .” He goes on to enumerate past acts of God’s faithfulness. After Joshua led the Israelites across the Jordan River he had them set up stones as a monument to help them remember to tell their own children of God’s miraculous rescue. We too need to remember specific acts of God’s faithfulness.
I have found that one of the many blessings in aging is that we have lived long enough to experience God’s faithfulness in numerous situations. We’ve seen His provision in the lives of others. Yet it is so easy to forget, easy to focus on regrets. Recently I have been encouraged to take time to specifically list ways that I have experienced God’s faithfulness throughout my life.
Last weekend my husband and I were in our cars at eight AM on Saturday morning driving the one and a half hour distance to our daughter’s home. It was the beginning of a four day adventure in babysitting our daughter and son-in-law’s five boys. I’d survived the same challenge in late October by myself for four days so I thought as I drove north, This can’t be too hard, I’ll have help for twenty-four hours.
My first clue that I was delusional was a phone call to the babysitter who had kept them overnight. She told me the youngest, twenty-two months, was throwing up all night and had diarrhea. Lovely, I thought. After we arrived, we were immediately immersed in shuttling the boys to their basketball games, and staying to watch, feeding them popcorn and nachos and other nutritional delights, and changing lots of bad diapers. The diaper-changing was my job, of course. We also became hyper-vigilant about hand washing. Ours!
Even though the temperature hovered around thirty-two degrees all weekend, my husband rallied the older boys for a service project on Sunday around noon––cleaning out their mom’s car, which was a disaster, having not been cleaned thoroughly in years. We understood. Ours used to look the same way. What mom of that many little kids can keep a car clean? Why not get the real culprits to restore some of what they had destroyed?
My husband left for home shortly after they finished the car. I was alone with five little boys. I can do this, I told myself.
One of the disappointing things about being an Empty Nester is that I still worry about my kids. I remember when I was young with little kids watching my older empty nester friends who didn’t seem to have to worry about their children any more. I looked forward to that freedom I would experience. And then my kids grew up and left home and I still worry. It’s a real bummer.
You would think that by now we would have learned to trust our kids to the Lord––to release them with great abandonment into His care. Not so! We still wear the hat of Mom, and for at least 20 years we’ve spent lots of emotional energy in worrying and praying and trusting. The cycle doesn’t automatically end when they leave home.
Worry comes in a different form now. If our children live far away we worry because we don’t know how they are really doing. And if we have a creative imagination we can conjure up all sorts of worries about an absent adult child. If a child lives nearby or bounces back to live at home again they bring with them their own concerns and issues which we can’t escape because they are right under our roof again.
So what do we do when we still worry about our adult kids?
February 26
February 19