Mothers Don’t Own the Market

It’s been two months since our last chick flew the coup.  I joked in my last blog about how reactions to you being an empty nester varied between genders.  A lot of attention does get focused on the mother because it’s just assumed she will be an emotional mess.  That is true.  But what I suspected and later verified is that fathers also experience a profound sense of loss… but for different reasons.

When my husband finished our basement, we intended it to be an adult retreat.  We planned on hosting our friends down there and decorated it with us in mind.  What we didn’t count on was our son taking over the space we created for ourselves.  Yes, it was cooler in the summer, but it also afforded him a lot of privacy.  Rather than an adult retreat, the basement became “his” domain and always housed 1-2 friends every weekend. 

I bring up our basement because after we returned from taking our son to school, it was the basement that made me realize my husband was hurting, too.  He had to go down there for some reason, and returned upstairs more melancholy than when he left.  He confessed that being down there made him teary eyed because memories of our son were everywhere.  He missed him… terribly. 

I understood what he was feeling because when both my children left, it took me a while before I could go into their rooms.  I simply kept doors shut.

There are differences between men and women and the relationships we forge with our children.  In general terms, when children are young, men spend a lot of physical and mental time working and building their careers.  Yes, women do, too, but we also tend to be as much if not more focused on the day-to-day, minute-by-minute details of our children’s lives.  And while my husband was always a very involved father, this was the case in our home. 

What I came to learn that by the time my husband had the time to develop new, more adult relationships with his sons, they were late into high school and then off to college.  My “babies” left.  For him, his “buddies” left.  Similar but different losses.  Both profound.

My husband reaches out to our boys often to catch up with them and continues to build on the “adult” relationship he started.  They continue to reach out when they need help with a car, a handyman question or to shoot the bull about football.  Watching these relationships grow and change is one of the privileges of motherhood — almost makes cleaning up barf in the middle of the night worth it…. almost.