Empty Nesters

A good first anything is always a difficult act to follow – consistency is the hardest to maintain and like everything else in our lives that’s true of a writing a blog post too.

Recently, I read an article written by one of my favourite authors (Suketu Mehta) on how the world is divided into two sets of folks - those with kids & those without and it got me thinking about our soon to be empty nest.

It also managed to bring back some lovely memories, those two days' when unplanned miracles blessed our lives and put us in the former category, thus changing our lives forever. 

As young parents, we fumbled clumsily to do the right things and failing quite so often. Luckily, our kids have forgiven us, perhaps due to our constant acceptance of our mistakes and candid confessions of loving them despite our imperfections.

In the early days of parenthood, I guiltily admit to envying every single young person, watching them party evening after evening, while I ran home to be with my babies. I envied every career driven young (gender no bias) who raced ahead of me, I admit to feeling low for being denied promotions and for being considered a wild card who (the mother in me) may quit her job any day. I foolishly remember the immature me, trying to keep up with the singles’ at every step yet not managing to succeed ever so often.

If only, there had been a crystal ball to peer into during those years of growing pains, it would have surely saved me the embarrassment, as I look back.

Now as our young 20 year old moves out to pursue her masters in journalism, and travels to foreign lands to live her dream – I (my partner is more discrete) am at the cross roads of mixed emotions feeling the pangs of change tug at me. And this is just the beginning, our nest will truly be empty in another 3 years.

Life without the messiness of these little pups seems unimaginable. The dinner table conversations about F-1, football, politics, live commentaries about our days’ experiences, the healthy sibling rivalries, the friendly debates, favourite television shows, amusing tales of our two canines, animated discussions of where to holiday next- (Sigh) how our lives were enriched and now this buzzing nest life will be different forever.

All of us will move into the next undiscovered phase of our lives.

As we move to our new experiences, my advise to those yet young parents is;

• hug your kids more often than you already do
• tell them you love them as often as you can
• talk to them about their dreams while they want to share these with you
• learn about their friends while you can
• teach them to be ethical in their jobs, while they are willing to listen
• respectful to those less fortunate than yourselves
• teach them to be gracious in defeat and humble in victory
• teach them to be charitable through example
• tell them its okay to make & accept mistakes as long as you learn wisely from them
• teach them the right values on love and forgiveness and most importantly tell them that relationships are more important than any amount of money you can make
• teach them friendships and family are irreplaceable and to share your good fortune with those you love, after all what’s the point of being successful if you don't share it with your loved ones

I do truly have an amazing partner (the spouse does always know best - they live with each other) and we believe together we have managed to imbibe some of these ideals in our baby birds.

And as  they fly away and leave our nest empty, we hope that despite life’s struggling battles these early values will stay alive with them at all times. We wish these two kittens the very best of success, happiness, peace and good fortune, that we have been blessed with.

Perhaps this is also the right time for my partner and me to be 20 again and re-discover each other - restart where we left off….

Holding that thought - till next week.