I have been tossing out my original ideas and notes for posts this past week. So I have written a few things at the last minute which I said I wouldn’t do this year. Yesterday I spent all day checking, rechecking, and editing. Today I have changed topics again.
I’ve previously written about nesting. But I want to figure out if talking about nurturing might get at some aspect of contemporary womanhood that can evoke more than perfunctory wedding, family, and eventually empty nester sequence.
I still find it to be an intriguing topic to discuss with other women. I’ve seen women want nothing more than to settle down and have children. I have to confess that I was not one of them. I never gave much thought to getting married, or nurturing a family. During my first adult, long-term relationship, I thought that we might consider marriage eventually, but after a couple years of living with the guy, I knew there was no way I wanted to be legally connected to him, nor would I ever want to have a child with him.
Eventually I did marry and have a child. I never felt better than when I was pregnant. I was suspicious that this was nesting behavior, that I was biochemically brainwashed? I think there was some of that. It seemed to last for a long time. Do our brains ever become less nurturance-oriented?
We do not all experience the same type or range of feelings. What was the most difficult part of transitioning to the adult form of you that hung around most of your adult life until menopause?
Can “Is this all there is?” exist with raising a normal, healthy family? Could not being fulfilled, or suppressing feelings, behind a happy home life, lead to empty nest syndrome?”
Why do you think you experienced, or did not experience, empty nest syndrome?
Does feeling that you’ve done a good job, and now it is time for your child/children to test their wings and fly away?
If you were totally honest with yourself, did the expense of raising children, offer up relief when that task was done?
How much do you think that having a rewarding career, or passion for an avocation, impacts the energy you put into parenting? Was there a part of you that really wanted time to yourself again? If you could have afforded hiring a nanny, would you have wanted one?
All these questions and considerations have some element of happiness and satisfaction as a mother, woman, and just as an adult. When these elements were not in balance, how did you handle it? Implicitly this is asking what you learned about balance that you would advise other women to consider and employ to help them along their paths? How might your empty nest phase have influenced the mature adult to mature adult parent-child relationship?
And the biggest question in this area, for me: why does children children growing and leaving home mean that a woman, or couple, has to stop tending their nest? If a parent or couple are stilling living in the nest, why call the nest empty? How did your nurturance change through time, in practice and in principle.
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