Empty Nests

There's a sweet Talk of the Town piece in the New Yorker this week about a support group for empty-nest parents. I especially liked this quote:

“I think this empty-nest thing is a new phenomenon,” one weary-looking mother of two said. “I went to a Syrian wedding recently, and they all live just two blocks from each other.”

It certainly seems to me a lot of our societal customs and organizations are designed for families that are geographically united. Actually, the children discussed in the piece haven't travelled much farther than Brooklyn. In our family, though, it's typical for at least one or two children to be on different continents at any moment. Telephones and email and jet planes compensate for dislocation, indeed make it possible, but they don't compensate entirely. In dreams begins responsibility; with freedom comes loss. There's something tempting about living in a large but tight-knit family all under the same roof, even though you know in practice it would be stifling and unbearable to a modern person.

But I'd better get back to work.