PenPenWrites

It took us almost 10 years to clear out our children's bedrooms. They were launched into the world and starting families of their own before we came to terms with the idea that they no longer needed their old bedrooms. And that if we took over those rooms, they wouldn't feel disowned.

I was reminded of those feelings when I read a recent piece in the New York Times by Michelle Slatalla. She is moving east and had to clean out the bedrooms of her college-age daughters who were away at school. It made her remember how awful she felt when her mother bundled up all the talisman's of her youth and dismantled her room. She was concerned that her children would feel the same way. 

Maybe it was the grace of ten years, but I didn't worry about what my children would think. They would still come home for visits but they wouldn't be sleeping in their old beds surrounded by memorabilia from their grade school days. But Paterfamilias was unnerved by the dismantling–in fact, he resisted it for several years. He worried that his children would feel less welcome when they came home for a visit. On an even more gut level, he seemed to feel it was proof that our family had changed, that our children had grown up and moved away to other cities in other parts of the country. And he didn't like to admit it.

Empty nesting is a tricky thing. I've read stories–usually in decorating magazines–about parents who, garbed in a celebratory mood–re-do their now-extra bedrooms within days of their child moving out. I don't necessarily envy them. I wonder at the quick dispatch of the past. Of course, it may be that they desperately needed the extra space. Our son and daughter had the two biggest bedrooms in the house–on the top floor with high cathedral ceilings, skylights and huge picture windows. We took the room off the kitchen–it had more closets and a bigger bathroom. For us to move upstairs to their rooms meant ripping out the built-in desks and bookcases and replacing them with closets and an addition to the bathroom. There was nothing impermanent about the takeover of their space. We carefully boxed up anything they had left behind–that stuff is still in its boxes in the basement; they have never opened the boxes or asked after the old notebooks, textbooks or drawings in them.

They still come home to visit. They sleep in the guest room or on the pull-out couch in the downstairs rec room. I like to think that not retiring to their old rooms–or sleeping in their old bunk beds–makes them feel more grown up and independent, that it helps change the dynamics of the visit. There's no reason to slip back into teen-year patterns. It's a whole new adult world inside the house. The only little kids in it are theirs.