Empty nest? Not quite

There is a moment every morning when I wonder what it would be like to have an empty nest. It usually occurs between listening to my 27-year-old daughter repeat for the umpteenth time that she doesn't want to do, eat, drink, or wear something in that peculiarly piercing tone universally employed by children towards their parents – her being special needs seems to have made little difference to that particular dynamic. And then, I trudge up two floors to wake my 22-year-old son, who complains that no alarm is as loud as I am.

My day begins for me at 5 am, when my daughter prods me awake, fuelled by a mix of anxiety and stress. Various tactics – playing dead, pretending to be my husband (even snoring!) sleeping on his side of the bed, or announcing a walk only to sneak into another room – fail to deter my clever girl. Eventually, I give up, stumble into the kitchen, and seek solace in a lifesaving cup of coffee. However, the cuppa revives my brain cells, reminding me promptly of my son's slumbering form. That's when I'd give almost anything to muster the courage to let sleeping sons lie.

Then there’s food and drink. Shaking my daughter’s protein shaker and testing the temperature of the contents, I’m caught in a time warp – were we not shaking a bottle and handing it to her not too long back? Asking my son about his missing lunchbox, I hear his 4-year-old lisp coming through his baritone when he replies, “Left it behind in class, sorry, Mamma.”

By the time the two leave the house for their respective college and vocational centre, I am the same frazzled self I was at 35 when they were going to school – a whole new way to be able to say “I don’t feel a day older than…”

From tripping over toys and art materials and finding clothes I could get her into easily to persuading my 20+ adult children to eat, I feel like I’m in the restaurant at the end of the universe, tantalisingly tipping over the edge into liberation but always coming back.

When my friends talk about the large empty spaces in their houses where their kids used to be, or sitting with their spouse watching the sunrise, or deciding to travel on a whim, I feel like a kid in a candy store.  

But then magic happens. When my son comes home from college, plonking on my bed and ranting (or raving) about his day, and joining us in a drink as we talk late into the night about life, the universe and everything. And when the daughter, with headphones firmly in place, is grinning, dancing in a way only she can, or reversing her gangly self onto my lap and chatting, using some new word, to my utter delight. The thought of an empty nest fades into the background — until the next morning, that is.