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| Capitalstars Investment Advisor |
All you folks out there who keep yearning for the attention of the children who have left for a
purposeful and serious pursuit of their future, let it be known that the children will be fine.
Someone asked me how it felt to be an empty-nester. I dislike that word and its negative connotations. I told them I am having the time of my life. Which is true. When there is no lunch box to pack, no exam to stress about, the kitchen churns your kind of food and the music playing in the background is your choice, what is there to complain about?
After years of responsibility of caring for the parents, the in-laws, the children and everyone else who came to visit each one of them, it is now time to simply live with the man I love and married. Just us, our conversations, little quarrels, and plentiful time to do whatever one wished to do. I would call the years since the children left the house for higher studies as the best years of my life. Oh, I love them dearly. I haven’t sent them to war. They are out there building themselves with their own experiences, their own efforts. My job is done, thank you.
What I love more is the transformation in the money decisions of the household. After an initial period of anxiety about grades and graduation, the brats are now working. They are now so completely off our back, that the relief has to be experienced to be believed. When they fuss about expenses, tell you the pinch they feel when they pay for something, and how they wait for a bargain to buy something, I chuckle in quiet glee. Memories of childhood tantrums at the toy shop come in, but I am gracious enough to not rub it in. Let’s get to the list, now.
1. the focus moves from saving to spending and it is absolutely joyous. After years of setting aside money for the children, and worrying about funding their education, suddenly that higher education goal is done and dusted. As is the wont of middle-class families, we pushed and sacrificed, and overfunded that goal. Then the children got scholarships, took on assistant-ships, and went to work. We both continue to work and wonder what we will spend the earnings on, beyond utilities and grocery bills. The children hate to hear about our savings ratio, and we have begun to worry too. We have to learn to spend.
2. The shift from things to experiences happens I guess, as one age, but children living in faraway lands reinforce it like nothing else. The joys of the phone calls; the short breaks filled with conversations around the kitchen table; the lazying at the living room over endless rounds of indoor games; and the spontaneous breaking into singing favorite songs, all remain experiences to cherish. They laugh when we ask what we can buy for them as if that were a stupid question. It actually is. It takes getting a precious two weeks a year with grown-up kids to know that money should not be wasted on stuff but preserved for precious experiences.
3. Travel has taken a new meaning. After years of planning holidays that pandered to the preferences of the children, we now travel to see museums; to walk for miles into a thick forest; to wait for hours to watch the birds; to simply drive and see the setting sun. In the initial years of the children leaving the house, our trips were carefully curated to visit places they would not be interested in visiting. We died of guilt thinking about taking a holiday without them.
4. We finally spend serious money on hobbies. Martyrdom is a tough thing to shake off. When the children were growing up, every serious generous spend was about their activity and their hobbies. I remember telling them that there is no budget for buying books, as long as they read every single book that they bought. One day the daughter asked me, why doesn’t that rule apply to you mom? I was mostly borrowing at the awesome corporate library where I was working at. Now there is no budget for books. Or the garden. Or music. We spend on the hobbies, and that has added so much meaning to those pursuits and taken it to levels we enjoy.
5. We have found the ability to give and be generous. We weren’t exactly Uncle Scrooge, but we could have given more. Bringing up children is at one level a very selfish pursuit. We find it difficult to prioritize anything but them, and everything we own and have is theirs. We hoard and save; collect and indulge; spend and splurge, all to please the little monsters. Then the shame of it all dawns on us when the kids have left home. There is the big world out there with millions of others whose needs are seriously underfunded. The privilege of birth cannot tip the scales so much in favor of our own.
The joys of working for the community, of allocating time to social causes, of helping out those in need, and of participating in meaningful acts of charity have brought immense satisfaction, having increased after the children grew up and left.
So all you folks out there who keep yearning for the attention of the children who have left for a purposeful and serious pursuit of their future, let it be known that the children will be fine. They have chosen a path that is theirs, and they will own their decisions and be accountable for the consequences. Do not waste the golden years of your life trying to insert yourself into their lives.
It is so little you know about the challenges they face, and you may not have the competence to solve their problems. Enjoy the bond of love, be empathetic when they need a listening ear, but move on with your life. A new life beckons, and don’t waste it sulking.