Soiling the Nest

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Another college drop-off.

This time it is my youngest, who is starting his freshman year at my alma mater.

And so, thanks to my wonderful husband doing the driving, I have a moment to ponder this new milestone.

Over the weekend, I talked about the nest and how, as it empties, it somehow fills with other things.

Well, let’s talk about soiling the nest.

Two silhouetted birds stand on opposite sides of their nest against a golden sky, embodying the tension in their home during a period of change.

I’m sure some of you have heard about this phenomenon before. I had heard of it, too, but I didn’t know that it had such a fitting moniker.

What does soiling the nest mean?

Well—just what it sounds like.

Shitting in your house.

It's that period before a kid leaves home when the bickering seems to increase, the eye rolling becomes Olympic level, the nagging reaches new heights, and everyone suddenly finds everyone else incredibly annoying.

The kid is excited to go. The parent is excited for them to go.

The parent is also devastated that they are going.

The kid is ready to move on to the next chapter. The parent is proud of them for being ready to move on to the next chapter.

And yet somehow everyone ends up arguing about dirty dishes.

Or laundry.

Or whose turn it is to walk the dog.

Teenager mastering household chores by washing dishes, readying himself for independence as he leaves the nest.

Or some other completely insignificant thing that, at the time, feels like the final straw in a decades-long family dispute.

This morning, I was talking to my sister and realized that soiling the nest isn’t even limited to houses with college students. My nephew is starting junior high, and apparently, he may have done a little nest-soiling of his own this morning.

Because maybe this is what we do when we are approaching a transition.

We make the nest just uncomfortable enough that leaving it doesn’t seem quite so terrible.

And to be honest with you, it’s not just the kid who is soiling the nest.

Adults, even though we are not yet in the diaper stage of our lives, can be guilty of doing our fair share of soiling, too.

My first memory of a parent soiling the nest is from 1989.

Other Gen Xers may remember the Family Ties series finale, when Alex P. Keaton is getting ready to move to New York for his bigwig Wall Street job. His mom, Elyse, basically iced him out for the entire two-part episode.

As a thirteen-year-old, I don’t think I appreciated the intricacies of everyone’s emotions.

But almost forty years later, I know exactly what Elyse was feeling.

There is a large part of me that wants to sit in a corner and pout and say to my youngest:

I have devoted every bit of myself to you since that first moment I held your chubby little body.

And now you are excited about leaving.

How dare you?

A tender moment captured: A mother gently holds her newborn son, enveloped in warmth and love amidst a backdrop of soft, colorful shapes and leaves.

Of course, I don’t actually want him to stay.

That would be a little awkward. And annoying. The movie Stepbrothers come to mind.

I have spent the last eighteen years trying to prepare him to leave. I have taught him how to do laundry and make food and navigate the world without me. I have spent years telling him to be responsible, independent and capable.

And now he is.

Which IS apparently the problem.

Because Alex Keaton was struggling with the same thing in that episode. He was excited about his new life. He was eager to leave his friends and start his glamorous Wall Street career. And he couldn’t understand why his mother, who had always been his biggest cheerleader, suddenly seemed so unhappy about it.

At thirteen, I was firmly on Alex’s side.

Of course he should go.

Of course he should be excited.

Of course his mother should be proud of him.

Now, as a mother watching her youngest pack up for college, I want to shake Alex a little and say, “Could you maybe understand that this is hard for your mother?”

A mom and her son stand in the frosty air, wrapped in thick jackets, as they engage in a conversation under the soft winter sunlight.

Because that’s the strange thing about parenting.

We spend years working ourselves out of a job (and yes me and my bank account know that I am not totally unemployed yet).

How excited are we when they learn to walk; and then they walk the other way.

We teach them to make their own decisions, and then one day they make a really big decision that doesn’t involve us.

And we are thrilled.

And heartbroken.

And proud.

And occasionally pissed off about them not walking the dog.

All at the same time.

Maybe that is what soiling the nest really is.

Maybe it’s not just teenagers trying to make their parents slightly less necessary.

Maybe it’s all of us trying to make separation a little easier.

Because if the nest were perfect—if everyone were perfectly happy, perfectly kind, perfectly appreciative of one another right up until the moment the kid walked out the door—maybe leaving would feel impossible.

So instead, we bicker.

We roll our eyes.

We nag.

We talk back.

We slam doors.

We get annoyed about things that don’t really matter.

We soil the nest.

And then, eventually, we leave it.....

Well, they do.

And the rest of us sit in the quiet house and wonder how something can feel both so empty and so full at the same time.

I suppose that’s the trick of the nest.

You spend eighteen years making sure your children are ready to fly away.

And then, when they finally do, you realize that maybe you were never actually preparing them to leave.

You were preparing yourself to let them go.

A joyful moment captured: a mother holds her newborn son, eighteen years before he would eventually leave the nest