Empty-nesting in reverse

Here I am, on the other side of the Atlantic. It's déjà vu all over again. This year, or much of it, husband and I will be based in Cambridge, England, at Clare Hall College, where husband has been awarded an international visiting fellowship, and I have been awarded 'partner' status (someday I want a tee-shirt depicting an ivy-covered wall that reads 'trailing spouse'). The college's motto is "a place to think". 

"I think we're mad," I said to husband as our preparations for departure ramped up. It was a lot of work. Saying goodbye to home, friends and neighbors, the garden, the pets--the dog and two cats--heart-rending. 

Clare Hall. Our flat is somewhere in the middle. 

At least we were spared saying farewell to our children as we left Toronto, because they had flown to London the week before, in order to spend several days with their grandfather. Among other activities he seems to have set his sights on teaching them the rules of cricket. As far as I can tell, he very nearly succeeded. Mercifully, just as they were on the verge of understanding such concepts as leg-before-wicket and 110-not-out and 7 ball over, and were consequently at risk of suffering the nefarious neurological changes such an inculcation might entail--the three kids took themselves off for a siblings' jaunt to Dublin for the rest of the week. They had a blast. Cricket must wait.

 

Meanwhile, Heathrow welcomed husband and me to the best of its 1950s brutalist ability. There have been upgrades. The automated passport control system worked well, and our luggage arrived promptly. In fact we spent more time in Toronto checking in the two massive suitcases than we did collecting them at the other end, because the conveyor belt at Toronto's Pearson Airport had broken down. Even that glitch offered a little serendipity: while we twiddled our thumbs waiting for the bag-drop to return to service, a friend and colleague whom I had not seen in person since pre-pandemic, and whom I had very much wanted to see before leaving, just happened by ( YouTube star Andrea Furlan, the pain doctor). We did a little reunion dance involving elbow bumps. It was the perfect send-off. 

Arriving in England after a two-and-a-half year absence has felt both momentous and ordinary. There have been moving moments: the covid-postponed stone-setting or unveiling ceremony for my mother-in-law, Rochelle, who died during the pandemic, the reunion with my father-in-law, my sister-and-brother-in-law and niece and nephew, as well as other family and friends. There have been wonderfully ordinary moments: shopping at Sainsbury's and popping a box of their own-brand Earl Grey tea into the trolley. Knowing that next week we can go back for more. 

Rochelle's beautiful gravesite

We crafted a mini-holiday for the five of us, fun family outings in Cambridge, in London, in Brighton and Lewes. Our children are sheer joy to travel with. What luck for us.

Punting on the Cam

 

Palace Pier, Brighton

Then, on a sunny Sunday, we drove them to Heathrow and said tearful goodbyes. Our three nestlings returned to Canada, the country their father and I chose to make their home twelve (12!) years ago. Back to their jobs, university, friends, pets. 

Heathrow farewell (followed by a parking ticket)

Husband and I stayed put here in England, sans enfants for the first time. We are empty-nesting in reverse. We will parent remotely. We will enjoy our adventure as a twosome. Letting go is meant to happen. We know that. And yet...

So far, I am loving Cambridge and our flat and college life and new friends. Clare Hall is indeed a good place to think, and I have much to think about: work, writing, reuniting with old friends. 

But when I pause to think about the ocean between me and my three children (and the pets), I confess I think about crying.   

Heigh-ho. We shall see how it goes. 

Snowbirds

The dog likes California

In Canada lives a species of human beings they call 'snowbirds'. Like many other birds, these creatures emigrate from the True (and truly icy) North to southern climes in the winter months. Usually they are retirees without jobs holding them in place, and they are also child-free or, to continue the avian theme, empty-nesters, and thus exempt from the need to obey school term schedules. Ontario law permits residents to live outside of the province for seven months of the year while still retaining rights to health coverage and other public goods.

In this increasingly digital world, it's not only retirees who may participate in this circular migration. It is possible to work remotely. We decided to give it a try during husband's sabbatical this term (finally-- his first in 2 decades), and have decamped with high-school daughter to California. We are based in Los Angeles, staying with my kind and generous parents. The timing is pretty good. Daughter is in Grade 10, the second of four years of high school, and the one during which there is an amount of slack available. "Go ahead," advised her principal/ headmistress. "Let her enjoy the month. I'm sure she'll learn so much from being there. Don't worry too much about keeping up with assignments." And indeed the child has learned a lot. We've visited museums, seen wildlife (elephant seals, newborn harbor seal pups, sea otters, deer) and conversed with park rangers about them. She has discussed geography, talked politics, and, beautifully, has lots of time for reading books. We attended the LA Times Festival of Books and listened to Roxane Gay and Laurie Halse Anderson talk about rape culture and women's empowerment ("fuck forgiveness," said RG).

Diligent daughter did worry about keeping up with assignments. She kept an activity log for her PE teacher. We found a circus skills class for her to attend, and also visited Muscle Beach, in Santa Monica, where she further honed impossibly unbelievable feats of balance and strength. Relying on a variety of devices she has completed math homework and submitted essays; she has remote support from teachers and classmates. The other day she asked me to film her acting out a scene from a 'life in the 1950s' script, which her project group spliced into their own clips and handed in to the history teacher. And, blessedly, she gets a month of nights of plentiful sleep.

Husband has glued himself to his study space in my parents' dining room and written more of his book as well as composing papers he will present next month. I created two workspaces for myself: one in my old childhood bedroom and another, my favorite, for mornings, at the picnic table in the back garden, overlooking the swimming pool and the roses, azaleas, jasmine, and bougainvillea. I'm convinced that inhaling the floral scents and listening to the unpredictable hollow gong of windchimes in the pepper tree enhances my productivity. Hummingbirds buzz by. I've been disciplined, working for several hours every morning, and then taking the afternoons and evenings for activities with my parents and daughter (sometimes husband is persuaded to join us).

And best of all, timing-wise, I've managed to overlap at least a bit with both sisters, all their children, and a brother-in-law. I celebrated my birthday here and efficiently made it overlap with Passover Seder, so that much of the family could join me for both at once. Missing, unfortunately for us, were our sons, the elder in Europe for the term and the younger in the midst of final exams in Toronto. It's been a wonderful month with my parents who are both in their late eighties and full of vim and vigor. My dad continues to work three days a week and my mother keeps house. She tells me often to stop helping her. "I can do it myself," she says, feistily, reminding me of my children when they were small. Both parents looked after Jordi the dog (yes we brought the dog with us) while we drove up the Pacific Coast Highway for a few days. I honor them. They're kind of my role models.

This Saturday at the end of April we head back to Toronto where the weather forecast for the week is grim, chilly rain. I repeat: at the end of April. It's my recurring disappointment with Toronto. We endure a Canadian winter followed by an English one. Every year I'm disappointed anew.

So, while I don't look forward to empty-nesting, and can't quite imagine retirement, I do think that I could get the hang of this snowbirding gig.

My morning desk 

Elephant seals at Piedras Blancas

Birthday trail run

Daughter at Original Muscle Beach

The flying machine and the spinning wheel

One good thing about 2017 is that apparently there were no commercial airline fatalities. I wish I could regard that fact as reassuring, rather than superstitiously thinking of it as jinx.

The last month or two involved a lot of traveling for our family, separately and together, some for work, but most for pleasure, though linking 'pleasure' to air travel is something of an odd concept these days. I counted a dozen flights in a six-week span involving one or more of my immediate family. I anxiously mentally ticked off each one completed. It's stupid. I know that the journeys to and from the airport are statistically more dangerous than the flights themselves, but as is so apparent in the world of today's politics, knowing is not the same as believing. I am a nervous flyer. I am even nervous when I am not the one flying. On Wednesday, elder son left Toronto to return to his university digs in Vancouver finishing our spate of flights. Sadness mixed with relief. Whew.

When we lived in the north of England, in Durham, and I had first one, then two, then three small children, I found myself once or twice or even thrice yearly making what I now see were marathon journeys, sometimes on my own, with the children. I didn't give the decision a second thought, just muddled through. It had to be done. The kindness of strangers benefited me more than I care to recall. (I now attempt to pay it forward.) Once, traveling solo with all three little ones, the youngest took a liking to the motherly woman seated across the aisle, and I allowed myself a brief nap while this complete stranger held the baby.  I had been up half the night packing, and we left for the small local airport at 4:00 am to make our connection in Amsterdam (I became very familiar with Amsterdam's Schiphol airport. I could find my way half-asleep to the baby baths, the rocking chairs, the play area, and most importantly, the best espresso bar) and there were another twelve hours to go before we landed in Los Angeles and had to face immigration and baggage claim. The twenty minutes or so of shut-eye before one of the older kids woke me for a trip to the loo saw me through. I am eternally grateful.

The more flying I did, though, the more anxious I got. Perhaps as the children got older and more self-sufficient, the more time I had to consider how little I understood about aerodynamics, and how much trust was involved in making these trips. Why did I do it to myself, asked a friend who refrained from travel until her own children were old enough to make it easy. A good question. Sometimes I did it because I loved visiting new places and didn't want having children to get in the way of that. Mostly, though, I flew the longest routes because they took me home,  to my childhood home. I wanted my children to know that place, that family, my parents, the aunts and uncles and cousins, all of whom lived on the west coast of the US. It was worth the anxiety and exhaustion, especially before I recognized myself as suffering from them. The friend who asked me 'why' had made a decision I often envy: to raise her own family where she herself was born and grew up.

I did, though, get tired of the adrenaline soaking my system for ten or twelve hours, when we took off, landed, or experienced the slightest turbulence; it began to take a toll, to make me physically ill for the first day after arrival. I needed some sort of rubric, a mantra, a logic to why I should not be terrified on airplanes. I asked people who had gone from fearful or non- flyers to comfortable ones. My sister said, "A little turbulence isn't going do anything." A friend said, "There is nothing you can do about it, anyway." I tried murmuring these words to myself when we hit bumpy air, but they only increased my anxiety.

And then I had an epiphany: the only time I could do anything about the 'danger' I perceived was  when I made the decision to buy an airlines ticket. If I couldn't know in advance whether a given journey would prove fatal, then it was every journey. It's not much of an epiphany, coming more under the heading of what my husband calls 'bleeding common sense,' but my possibly addled mind found it revelatory. Each journey is every journey. That's what I chant to myself these days when the plane bucks and rolls: "This is every flight. This is every flight."My decision was not about the wisdom or luck of being on this particular airplane; it was whether to live a life that encompassed air travel or one that didn't. And if I had chosen one that didn't, I would not have the husband I have or the children I have or even the career I have. It's like Sleeping Beauty's father, the king, banning all spinning wheels from his realm and banishing his own baby daughter to the deepest woods, for fear of her pricking her finger on a venomous spindle.

His scheme didn't work, after all. He missed his child growing up, and the stupid kid managed to stick herself with the damn needle after all. The malevolent sorceress got her vengeance. Then a handsome, charming pilot came along and saved her, along with the rest of the kingdom. At least, that's how I have rewritten the tale. (I'm not sure whether this metaphor actually worked out.)

Now I wish for a good fairy to ward off the dangers of cycling, walking on icy roads in dark evenings, and driving with maniacs about.

The moral of the story is that I can worry for England. And for Canada too.