The House is Waking Up

...as the holidays bring my children back to the nest

The holidays are here and my house is about to fill with friends and family, and this year, both of my adult children will be in their childhood bedrooms, which really haven’t changed since their high school days. I keep meaning to give them a reboot, but my heart hasn’t been able to take it. I walk by those rooms and whole, cherished feature-length movies reel by my mind. And now there’ll be new ones. I'd be lying if I said that I’m merely looking forward to it. It’s a whole lot more than that. I cannot wait for the house to come alive again with all of their sounds and smells and selves. But I also dread its departing. So temporary. So fleeting. It will come and go, just as it naturally needs to. And I will be what keeps my house alive. Just me.

It reminded me of how I felt at the end of the pandemic lockdown, when I was lucky enough to have had my kids at home for months. So I re-read an essay I wrote about that feeling…and it helped. May it help you, if you are an empty-nester anticipating all the feels of the holidays house, especially if it is about to fill up again with your adult children. Remember to breathe into it. Go slowly. Enjoy it for what it is. Not what it used to be. Not what it can’t be in the future. Just what it is right now. There will likely be some beautiful moments to hold long after it’s over. But please remember to glory in it as it unfolds. That’s what to hold onto most of all. The unfolding.

As seen on Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper

Well…it’s over. I took off my apron today and the house is quiet again. Just a 50+ year old and two white dogs staring into each others’ confused eyes. Goodbye to our “Long Spring Break,” as my 21 and 25 year old like to call it. My young adult children have been home, for the most part, since March 13^th 2020— the day I prematurely ended my book tour, came home to Montana, and bought beans, rice, and toilet paper like everyone else. The day I realized I didn’t have a job until some blurry time in the future when people can come on writing retreats in Montana again. The day my son realized that he didn’t have a baseball season or a college life. The day my daughter realized that she didn’t have to pay a Queen’s wage for rent in San Francisco, and could work remotely from her childhood bedroom, replete with PB Teen décor and plastic Breyer horses.

That first night of our Long Spring Break, we sat at the kitchen table and I spoke to them like a football coach— loud, strained, focused, and severe. And afraid. I’d never used that voice before. They looked at me like I was an alien. I was. I didn’t know how to parent young adult children. They had fledged, whether or not I liked it. And I’d gotten used to their new lives and my own.

I did know how to cook for adult children, however. Make the house pretty for the holidays. Stock the refrigerator to pre-empt hangry how-could-you We don’t have any sandwich meat??? eruptions. I knew how to take my young adult children on vacations and laugh with them and relax with them and explore with them. Not knock on their doors to ask them what this Zoom thing is and how to use it, only to hear, “Hang on! I’m on a conference call.” Or “Hang on! I’m in class.” Just standing there in the upstairs hallway in my pajamas with two closed doors and two kids on Zoom, and me with no Zoom knowledge and knowing I needed that knowledge in order to create a new way to work. Only to find out that we don’t have enough wifi for all three of us to be online. So guess who took priority? The one with a job, and the one in school. Not the suddenly jobless mother.

Fear set in. Suddenly I wished I’d been more Ma Ingalls and raised my kids more like the homesteaders who lived off this land in the 1800s. We were more “gentleman” homesteaders. We’ve liked our electricity and running water. I mean…what if the sh** really did hit the fan? And we were on these 20 acres, with no real working homestead skills? It’s true: I know a lot more about rural living than most of the people I was raised with in the suburbs of Chicago. But if we were really looking at surviving out here, the three of us…? I wonder. We only have water if we have electricity, given our well and its electricity-driven pump, and the power goes out seemingly at will. We live miles from town so suddenly our world became our 20 acres and we had to start thinking like homesteaders. I was sorry that I’d given away my old horse. He’d be a champ in all this. No longer was there anything fancy in our freezer or pantry. Like lamb. Or scallops. Or avocados. Turns out, you can do a lot with beans and rice. Suddenly I was buying vegetable seeds, never mind hand sanitizer. There wasn’t any left on the shelves anyway. Suddenly I was thinking about the illusion of power.

And with all of that…came all of them. The 20+ year-olds. All knocked out of their lives as they’d been living them. They needed a place to shelter in place. And I never would have dreamed how much I needed them. Their confidence, their strength, their willingness to help, their gratitude. And yes, each of them with their own form of Montananess.

A few of them knew about trucks. Others were great with an axe and a maul and a hatchet. All of them knew how to make a mean bonfire. Of course they did. I knew that there were springs on my property that the homesteaders used. If we needed to fashion a pump and carry water, I knew that they could. And would. Maybe we’d start a commune to wait this out and I’d be their Ma Ingalls.

They came willing to help, but also like 20+ year olds do: hungry. They came with their Montananess too— with tents and sleeping bags in their trucks—the ones their mothers drove them to pre-school in, now banged up and looking a lot like the way we all felt. They were smack dab in the middle of their happy college years. Some of them had planned to go abroad. Others had hard-won internships in cities. Some of them were loving their classes and teachers and illuminating conversation. All denied.

Suddenly the only thing that made sense to them was land. Montana land. Old friends. And a house where they could hang their socially-distanced hat for a while “until things get back to normal.”

I always told my kids that it would happen. “Someday, you’ll actually like living out of town. Someday you and your friends will love this cozy house and this firepit and our land. They’ll want to be here. Mark my words.” Their eyes would glaze over while I went on and on about this house that we built and have lived in for now 20+ years. With all its happy scars from country living: the floors scratched by dozens of dog nails, dents from highchair-flung sippy cups, and handprints on the ceiling from post-mudpie couch traversing. Good clean fun.

Well, I suppose you could call our Long Spring Break “good clean fun.” Suddenly they were hauling cedar chips to spread around the fire pit, and positioning camping chairs around it to “make it nice.” They put beauty into this thing called sheltering in place. These are respectful kids. They say please and thank you. They clean up after themselves. Sometimes when I join them at the firepit, they chant “Laur-A Laur-A” and that makes me ridiculously happy. (There may be beer involved. They’re college kids. And they’re of age. And they stay put. It was a different story when they were underage. Ma Ingalls is a lot more tolerant!)

But what they seemed to like even more than their red cup adventures and bonfires, was the fact that they knew they were living in an extreme time in extreme beauty, and never had they felt such gratitude for it. I saw it in their eyes. They found snow wherever they could and they played in it, with or without a chairlift. They were suddenly happy to UP-hill ski and take one long, luxurious and deserving ski DOWN instead of constantly checking how much “vert” they’d gotten after a high-speed quad lift up the mountain, and super-fast “shredding” in the “pow pow” down. That was in March.

Then when the snow melted, the backpacks came out. The kayaks. The “Bye, Mom. We’re going into the Bob Marshall Wilderness for a 5 or 6 day backpacking trip. There won’t be any cell phone service. We’ll text when we’re on our way back.” And I just sat here, watching this parade of young seekers. “Getting after it” as we say around here, but now they truly were. And yes, they’d return, pitch their tents, make those bonfires. Get out the grill pan. Bring out the hamburgers or the chicken or the fish they’d caught. I’ve never heard such laughter. They needed that laughter and they needed each other and they needed some land to hold their loss and their fear of their futures. And their fun. It might even be…that these young adults needed me. That…felt new. And very very good.

Then summer ended and the cold came and so we took the fun inside. The same pod, all Covid free. All very careful to remain so. There began the slumber parties and the endless cooking. I pretty much wore an apron the whole time. By then I’d pivoted my career and was able to take my work online, and shower our little pod of 20+ year-olds with as much kitchen love as I could. And that’s a lot.

Over and over again I heard “Thank you so much!” “Can I help?” “What can I do?” Over and over again I showed them things that they didn’t seem to care about when they were teens. Like how to cut an onion. How to stretch and fold sourdough. How to make smashed potatoes. Anna potatoes. Any potatoes. 20+ year-olds really like potatoes. Guitars came out. The lonely piano was played by fingers that hadn’t touched ivories since Suzuki days. They dug deep into the game drawers and laughed as they pulled out old Nerf gun pellets and superballs and race cars and yarn. Up came Sorry, Clue, Monopoly, Scattergories, Taboo, Scrabble, puzzles.

The kids came home and the house started moving— the ping pong table, the firepit, the garage, the game drawer, the instruments, the kitchen, the hearth.

This was the part I loved most: When the kids got too cold, or too hungry, or the smoke to eye-stingy, or their bladders too full, they came into the house. To a kitchen full of food and a woodstove full of flame, and they plopped down on the couch and talked to me. They wanted to talk. Yes they’d spent all day skiing or climbing mountains or on the river, but they knew that all of this would one day stop. And life would resume. And what would that be like? Who would we all be after all of this? Did they really want to go back to college and leave Montana? Did they really want to go back to a bashed and bloodied world? Was college even necessary? Were we all better for the pandemic? Had we learned things that we needed to learn? Of course we had. Mostly, what I saw, was that they had learned true gratitude. Deep, raw gratitude.

It felt important to remind them, when they were really down in the dumps, of what it was to live in a time of the Draft. My father, a man from a small industrial town in central Illinois, was drafted out of his Harvard Business School dream during World War II after only one semester, and thrown into basic training, not knowing if and when he’d be sent overseas. He never quite got over that.

“Yeah,” they’d say, in somber tones of honor. “At least we don’t have to worry about that.” Pre-pandemic, I don’t think they’d stop to ponder that. Really ponder that. And honor it.

I have to believe that this pandemic pod has lived it with memories that they never would have given themselves if it wasn’t for this uncertain world. They made their world certain and took it to the mountains, rivers, lakes, and yes…to my 20 acres. They laughed and played and had long talks and real thank yous and tearful goodbyes when their colleges/workplaces opened up and it was time to go back to their other lives.

The house is empty now. With one 50+ year-old woman and two white dogs in it. The apron is covered in flour and grease, hanging on the broom closet knob. I’m not going to wash it for a while. I miss being their Ma Ingalls. I miss them. But I’m glad they are out in the world again, whatever that world has to offer them. I know that they will seize it like they never would have, pre-pandemic. But I also know that they are better for having had each other during this time. And this land. And even me. I know it, because just now, I found a circle of heart-shaped rocks by the firepit.

Still room on the March 19-23, 2025 Haven Writing Retreat in Montana!

Go here for more information and to set up an introductory call with Laura to see if Haven is right for you. You do not have to be a writer to come to Haven. Just a word-wanderer. A person who longs to find their voice. A seeker who needs to step into their next chapter with writing as a potent guide. And if you are a writer, you will walk away with an even richer relationship with your muse, your practice, and any project you are working on or want to develop in any genre.