Tag Archives: Work-life balance

Boomerang! What Happens When the Empty Nest Refills

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I didn’t expect to find myself here, one year after I became an empty-nest mother and my husband and I downsized to a smaller house. We moved back to the city, barely a mile from where I work, after raising our two sons in Northfield, Minnesota, a two-college town with open minds and well-funded public schools.

I didn’t expect to become a cliché, the classic Baby Boomer whose grown kids have boomeranged home. And yet, that is precisely where life has landed me.

My boys — or men, as I’m training myself to call them — are living with us again, with their huge shoes and crusty socks and bicycles and soccer balls crowding our 1,500-square-foot house in St. Paul, minus the mud room and second full bathroom we had in Northfield. (Quick! Add a toilet in the laundry room.)

By habit and definition, I am a working mother again, balancing my time between job and family, and failing again, daily, to “have it all.” This time, however, I am called to redefine what “mother” means. Do I sign my reminder notes “Love, Mom” or “Amy”? Why do I write reminder notes at all? After 20 years as the family breadwinner, slogging through a 40-mile commute to my city job, do I sacrifice the yoga practice, time with friends and renewed commitment to writing that an empty nest allowed me?

Financial realities

Other parents struggle with these questions, too. Thirty-six percent of young adults in America ages 18 to 31 live with their parents, according to the Pew Research Center. That’s 21 million “emerging adults,” many of them educated and under- or unemployed. Pew calls families like mine “multi-generation households,” an effect of the still-lingering recession.

An August 2013 article in The Economist about the boomerang trend drew 70 comments — some by young people pointing out the sorry state of the job market, others by snarky “olders” criticizing the Millennials’ work ethic and impractical liberal arts degrees.

I worry whether my sons — both liberal arts majors — will be able to build a career as I did with only a baccalaureate degree. Will living at home, at ages 24 and 19, respectively, affect their social lives and ability to function independently?

Facts rarely assuage emotion. Knowing that other middle-aged mothers are buying milk by the gallon again and hauling three times the recycling to the curb every Thursday doesn’t change my experience — or my feelings about the experience.

Welcome back, Sam and Nate!

Welcome back, Sam and Nate!

So, ever the organizer, I have put some rules in place:

  1. Don’t over-parent. The 6-year-old boy who declared, “You’re not the boss of my clothes” has grown into a 24-year-old man who is working two jobs and recently spent seven months volunteering on behalf of injured animals and at-risk children in South America. He neither needs nor wants his mother overseeing his diet or other details of his daily life.
  2. Set financial expectations. With three active young adults in the house (did I mention the college student and his girlfriend in the basement?), the grocery bills alone would break the budget. The five of us negotiated an equitable system of shopping and paying for groceries; a magnetized whiteboard in the kitchen holds reminders and receipts.
  3. Catch the small stuff before it explodes. I get crabby when I’m the only one scanning the back yard for dog poop or when my small-town sons forget to lock the front door. So I shoot them a text message — simple, to the point and less threatening than face-to-face confrontation.
  4. Get to know them as adults. My college sophomore, an atheist, has shared his strong views about what he considers the hypocrisy of organized religion. He’s been willing to open up — and openly disagree with my free-form spirituality — because his dad and I are genuinely interested in what he has to say.
  5. Claim your alone time. As a careerist whose work kept me away from home a lot, I didn’t think adjusting to the empty nest would be so challenging. But the strange brew of relief and regret, seasoned with the powerful whoosh of time’s passage, left me feeling adrift and powerless for months. Solitary journal writing and teary talks with other mothers got me through it. Now, I don’t sacrifice my hard-earned alone time, even when the only way to claim it is behind a closed door — with the sound of music and my sons’ laughter drifting up the stairs.

Lesson learned: The concept of reframing helps me enjoy life as I age. Getting more time with my sons — at a point in life when I thought I’d rarely see them — feels like a second chance at all the family time I missed.

Back to the 50s: the “Best Decade”?

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Two decades ago, when I was 36, I took over a major-market newspaper column called “Women in Business” at the then-thriving Saint Paul Pioneer Press.

The women part interested me. The maneuverings and machinations of business? Less so, which is why I gravitated toward interviews about how women in the 1990s were navigating the careers they thought they wanted with the maternal and domestic roles they were raised to have.

These women, I wrote then, were a “breakthrough generation.”

My favorite article, then and now (when I’m living it rather than researching it), was called “The Best Decade: Women in their Fifties.” It was published in December 1994, six weeks before I gave birth to my second baby.

Women from ages 49 to 58 told me of the freedom their mothers’ generation had bequeathed them. None mentioned contraception or the women’s movement directly, but they knew they owed a debt to the birth control pill, to the trailblazing careerists who were the “first” in their professions (lawyers, physicians, stockbrokers, business executives) and to the Mad Men-era mothers who raised these women with the bittersweet admonition to “do more” than they themselves had done.

An editor eventually helped me evolve the “Women in Business” column to “On Balance: Issues That Affect Work and Home.” That allowed men to join the conversation, too. As I launch an updated version of that column — with a new title, in a different medium and from the path, farther on, of 20 more years of experience — I want to review the wisdom those women in their “best decade” shared with my younger self.

Help me measure what holds true today:

  • “Women of my age or younger have a sense of possibility that is really greater than our mothers had,” said a woman of 57, an entrepreneur who returned to college to earn a master’s in theology.

  • “Midlife is a period of reflection. That is not a new concept, and it’s true for men and women,” said a business executive, 51. “What may be different for women, and women in business, is that the issues they’re looking at aren’t necessarily what midlife women traditionally were looking at.”

  • “The public perception is that this is a negative time of life,” said the founder of what was then called the MidLife Women’s Network in Minneapolis. “But a whole group of women is saying, ‘I don’t buy that.'”

Women told me they wanted to develop the creativity and space for contemplation that, by necessity, they’d set aside to pursue careers:

“The midlife issue is how to get more time for oneself,” said one executive. “We want to cook on Sundays. We want to have a conversation with a friend. We want to read a book. We want to take long walks. We want to be not so much career people.”

Integration was a common word among these women — the generation that had worn a uniform of blue suits, had resisted any urge to personalize their offices with pictures of family and children, had taken up golf in order to meet men on their own turf.

“I used to wear two hats,” said a Target executive. “One was my professional self,” she explained, drawing a small box in the air. “The other was the personal side: more fun, more relaxed. It was a protection, I think. It was how I fit in a man’s world. Now, who you see is what you get.”

Many women acknowledged the price they’d paid for their fast-paced careers — a topic that my blog, “The Middle Stages,” will continue to explore. “Whenever you make choices,” one explained, “it is at the exclusion of something else.”

Middle age is the chance to fill that void, to take the risks that seemed impossible at a younger age. As I look back on my earlier article about women enjoying “The Best Decade” of their 50s, I am struck by their ease and comfort with themselves. They refused to become “invisible,” to be sidelined by society. Having operated in a masculine world, they were learning to embrace the feminine virtues and pastimes they’d once shunned as old-fashioned or irrelevant.

“If I think about who I am — the athlete, the broker, the person who likes to knit or cook — all parts are equally valuable. They all deserve attention,” said an investment broker about to turn 50. “Looking back when I’m 100 years old, the only thing I’m going to have regrets about are the things I didn’t do.”

Lesson learned: A “sense of  possibility” is essential at middle age. Embrace aging, don’t mourn it. And see how much more expansive life can become.