EMPTY NEST- The Parents Perspective

How do you feel when your best friend does not call you? When your crush suddenly ghosts you? When you are all alone for 2 weeks in a new city? When you are cornered from a group? When you're made to feel unimportant, unwanted, and unwelcomed?

This is exactly how our parents feel as we dive into our lives of adulting and move away from their protective shelter.

Empty Nest is an abyss of hollowness and emptiness parents face when their last child leaves the nest that was built for their vigilance right from birth. While it's quite obvious to develop pain, sorrow, and non-intentional abandonment from their children; parents too never contemplate that this would actually bother them the way it does at "the" point. Right from birth, our caregivers who choose to have us are naturally given the duty to take care of us. This process makes them haggard but they still become the sponges to all our tantrums, stubbornness, foolish behavior, and bad habits with patience and persistence.

I have therefore formulated 3 stages that our parents go through as we mature and finally leave home for good.

The beginning of an Altruistic Acquaintance

For the first child, parents are clueless about almost all of the things right from what to feed them, change diapers, and toilet training to how to differentiate between their cries and teach them values through little life episodes and situations. It's difficult on their part because they are new to it just like you trying to remember an important answer just before the exam because your friend told you so. This scenario becomes a little easier in the case of the second child as they gain the experience from their first one. Because now they have become immune towards it just like you remember the same answer for your next exam the best this time. But the pressure of raising us up with the utmost amount of caution, comfort, and most significantly exemplary restriction is every parent's goal, and let me tell you, the pressure is high in today's society. Parents literally suffer from acute and chronic mental health issues like stress, fatigue, and overwhelming response of what to do and not in an exquisite manner. But, by this time, we are their world and they would surmount any amount of difficulty and resistance to raise us duly and rightfully.

The Attachment vs Growing up clash

All that they have gone through with us, the bond and the attachment built are unimaginable. Their entire life is slowly assembled around us and it even gets merged at a given point. However, we try and isolate ourselves a little from this supervised environment to get our own time and privacy and explore ourselves along with the world. Without cutting off the sunlight with roofs of protection and care, parents take time to get adjusted to our outbursts of rattle about growing up - "I want space", "give me my privacy", "I am an adult now, so it's high time you treat me like one!". They start getting terrified of being distant, and we possibly drifting away from the right path. Hence, they become over-protective in nature, dominant, obsessively concerned, and restrict our liberty. This is when the parent-child relationship suffers the most because none of us are wrong in this place.

The Sun and The Rain

Just when parents start to understand us and adjust their parenting styles and forms in a way that aligns with our need for privacy and independence, it's time to go! This stage prepares them for a long time of solitude but unconsciously. The very fact that getting into college or university would also mean their children being away from them only surfaces when they're standing at the airport or station, or their homes, all set to leave with loads of luggage. That's when the "rush" comes in. We can't even imagine the numbness our parents go through at that point. It is hard to tell who experiences the sun or the rain in this case because they might be feeling the same thing or the opposite simultaneously or one thing different from the other simultaneously.

Writing this article took me back in time and really view how my parents might have felt when I left home for the very first time. This is what I want my readers to experience. Flashbacks take us into a world of escapism. It shows us all the life lessons and struggles we have gone through. The word parent is difficult to describe and I would need a whole another article for it. But in short, remember when they packed hot lunch that became cold later when we had it, came back tired from tuition to comforting home food, made us a glass of cold lemonade during summers, woke us up during relentless hours of prep for exams, took care of our drop-offs, covered us for our practical works while we studied, and even made us midnight MAGGI!

However, these flashbacks need to be fogged as reality awaits. We go ahead in life but this time acknowledging our parent's support and giving them little time from our busy schedules. One bittersweet teardrop falls and we are all set to embark on a new journey. And all that's left to say is, "GOOD-BYE".