The empty nest: "...whispered in the sounds of silence"

While taking an early morning drive to the Polk County dump (you know where it is, just off the Onalaska Loop) to rid myself of Christmas debris, I was sipping some coffee and pondering what to write about today.

The house is quiet, with the exception of Ruby The Dog who still wanders over a few times a day to nap and eat. The kids and relations have all gone their separate ways for the New Year.  K1 and our new son in law are off to Las Vegas for their honeymoon, K2 is back to work, and K3 has wandered back with her Grandma to Arlington to stay for a few days before going back to Texas Tech in Lubbock.

So on the way home, back down the Onalaska Loop, I had considered and discarded a few potential blog topics, and had about decided to forgo a post today for lack of inspiration.  But then it dawned on me that maybe the perfect topic isn't about what is going on in my post-holiday house, but what isn't going on, and how the wife and I are reacting to that lack of familial activity.

With three girls wandering in and out of the house over the last 25 years or so there was always a certain level of ambient noise.  I could always tell which combination of kids were in the house by what types of conversations were going on; not just by the actual words, but by the pitch and volume of the voices, or by the music from whatever TV shows happened to be on.  I could tell which daughter came in the house by how the door opened, and by how it closed.   All that combined into a kind of heartbeat of the house, and of the family itself.

And now the opposite: When kids started to move out I realized that when someone is out of the house for a period of time, the volume and type noise in the house is altered, and when enough people (in my case the kids) leave the house for an extended period of time, that "heartbeat" changes for good, and the silence that results from them leaving has an ambient noise all its own.

That new silence has its own levels and characteristics.  Early morning silence, I think, in that wonderful period of time between wakefulness and rising, is a kind of quiet that envelopes the mind in a warm embrace that invites you to just be, without taking that next step to actually think constructive thoughts.  Once that first thought forms, though, that warm embrace of quiet evaporates like mist and it becomes just another day.

But in the absence of the ambient noise that people produce the resulting silence can weigh heavy on the home, as if the houses itself is waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop. For me, at least, this sinister quiet always pops up when I start to think about my youngest daughter driving nine hours back to Lubbock, the oldest daughter going through a tough stretch at work, or the middle daughter driving across the county at three in the morning to go to work.

So I guess the question is if the sound of silence is there all the time, and is just masked by the everyday ambient noise of family life, or if the sounds of silence are a result of a lack of that every day noise?

Silence, I think, is just silence; it's a lack of noise.  The labels we put on it are just a result of the human obsession with trying to categorize whatever emotions are percolating at the time.

Which brings me back to the sounds of a quiet house, after the kids and other relatives have gone home.  In the quiet of early morning, or late night, I can hear the past echos of that family noise.  The actual sounds escape me, but I can hear the echos of what used to be, when the girls were little.

And that's the hell of the empty nest syndrome.  It's not the actual sounds of hectic noise that are missed, that cause the mind to think back fondly to the kids being little.  What is missed is what those sounds represent, what you think they signified.

I guess that's the boomerang effect of having enjoyed raising the kids we were blessed with.  Now that they're gone, I miss the little ones that they used to be.  I even kind of miss the teenagers they used to be, though not as much.  Each of them were challenging in their own way, though none of them were bad kids.  The memories of their teenage years are actually good, though that ambient "heartbeat of the home" tended to be much louder in those years.

<...yelling...shouts of outraged denial...&^&##!!!...final poke in the eye...chair turns over, flees the room>

OK, James is back, now.

That rat bastard Inner Self stole my password, logged on and tried to sneak a post by me.

I'm glad the little estrogenic wallet-lifters are out of the house.   Much quieter and more peaceful now.