T
ThyKingdomCome
Guest
I may not be fully understanding your point…but…I think about what I will do with my life when my nest is empty, but I don’t talk much about it. For two main reasons:
1-I am completely consumed with NOW. I simply am not that interested in worrying about the long term future when I have enough to worry about right now, or the shorter term future.
2-there are too many variables that would make planning for my empty nest futile at this time. I don’t know when my last child will be born, and thus how old I will be when my children are all adults. I don’t know what my dh’s and my health will be like at that point, and I don’t know if dh will still be working or if he’ll be retired. I don’t know what sort of involvement I’ll have in my adult children’s (and possible grandchildren’s) lives, and I don’t know what kind of involvement/responsibilities I’ll have in our extended family’s lives.
So given that, why would I go planning for that stage of life, and what can I really say that is meaningful, other than, “this will be a new stage of life, with new challenges. I don’t know what they are yet - I guess I’ll have to cross that bridge when I come to it.” ?
Given that, here’s what I imagine for the empty nest stage - I imagine myself traveling more with dh, singing in the church choir, volunteering, etc. I hope to have friends to socialize with at that point in my life, and if we are blessed enough to have children and grandchildren nearby, I hope to get to see them regularly. As a homeschooling mom, I don’t have much time to be a homemaker, so I hope to be able to hone my currently worse-than-mediocre cooking and cleaning skills.
To be perfectly honest, as I look into the future of my empty nest, it is hard to think about, because I mostly imagine myself sleeping.
I have this image of myself in a scene from a mattress commercial - finally getting the rest I had only heard about for all these years…so while I know that I will soon tire of all the opportunities to sleep, I really can’t get beyond it (back to reason #1 - consumed with the present), and while I do have some ideas about what life will be like, my #2 (who knows what the future really holds?) allows me to not fret or even dream about it too much.Both my mother and mil were SAHMs. Both of them are examples to me of women who dedicated themselves totally to their family (with totally different styles), without working outside the home, and who have made the transition to life without children in the house pretty naturally. They are both busy, both active, and when they first became empty nesters, because they didn’t have paying jobs outside the home, they were available to do other activities. So again, I really don’t think the empty nest is going to be a huge problem. I will say this. I will miss my kids, and it makes me sad just thinking about them growing up and moving on. So I imagine feeling sad about that loss when the time comes. But I assume this is based on my great love for my kids and my enjoyment of their presence, and I assume that this is something that working moms feel just as much as SAHMs. I will have to wake up one day, and they won’t be there in there starting their schoolwork in the schoolroom. But the working mom will have to come home from work, and not have them there to greet her at the door. We are all going to suffer from an empty nest experience no matter what we do during the day.
I’m not really sure what kind of “support” a SAHM mom or an empty nester would need. So I guess that’s where I’m not understanding what the problem is? I don’t really see why people arguing the merits of being a SAHM would be talking about what happens when the kids move out. That is a separate issue as far as I’m concerned.
