Empty Nest = Emptiness
I have figured out why they call it an empty nest–because it sounds like emptiness. This occurred to me the other day as I moved my son into college across the country. How had I never known this? I of course have heard about Empty Nest for years. I’ve seen the tears on parents’ faces, watched them shake their heads in bewilderment… but no one said a word about emptiness. They said things like, “It’s hard. It took me a week of nonstop crying, a month, a year…”
Empty Nest-Emptiness.
So, let me get this straight–we create nests to nurture new life, to create a soft place for our littles to grow, protected from the wind and rain, from predators, knowing all along that the entire point is for the nest to be abandoned once they are strong enough. What is this madness?
