Photo by Carly Pearson
Ila Kirkendoll is shown with her son Cedric Hunt. Kirkendoll recently moved her youngest son, Nicholas, to college and is facing an empty nest after raising eight children.
Ila Kirkendoll woke up one morning and realized the house was quiet.
That’s a rare gift in a home with eight children, four of them foster kids. But suddenly, the last of them had gone. Kirkendoll had helped the youngest get settled in at college Aug. 19 with all the running around that entailed, not getting back to Emporia until 12:30 a.m.
“We had driven 637 miles and never left the state of Kansas, if that tells you anything about it,” she said. “So Monday, when I woke up, it was like ‘Are they still in their bedroom? Is it really real? Is there going to be a knock on the door?’”
She got up, called her youngest, began to draw a bath. The day was ... almost relaxing.
“It was just me, but believe me, it felt good,” she said.
With the start of school this year, Kirkendoll is one of a number of “empty nest” parents who finally get the house to themselves. It’s a shift from Grand Central Station to “Home Alone.” There’s no need to be the chauffeur, the social planner, the eye on the door at one minute after curfew. Somehow or other, the kids have grown up.
It used to be thought that “empty nest syndrome” was a melancholy time, when parents might find themselves in danger of depression as they looked for a new focus in life. But these days, many researchers consider that a myth. If anything, they say, watching the last child spread their wings and go can be fairly liberating.
“Students always think their parents are doing worse now that they’ve gone,” psychologist Karen Fingerman of Purdue University told the APA Monitor on Psychology in a 2003 article. “Of course you want to think that when you move out, your mom must be devastated, but that’s not validated by the research.”
Which is not to say there are no mixed emotions.
“You know it’s going to come but it seems like it came too fast,” Kirkendoll said. “One day you wake up and it’s ‘Wow, my baby’s leaving.’ It seems like just yesterday when you were scolding him for this or scolding him for that and they’re gone. They do grow up.”
For Dave and Debbie Garrison, who live near Reading, it was a slow transition. Their three daughters were each born four years apart, so as one left high school and moved out, the next one became a freshman. That’s a lot of time to get used to the idea.
“It was a gradual process through the years,” Dave Garrison said.
More to the point, the Garrisons said, they had been preparing both their kids and themselves for the moment in little ways. It started around sixth-grade, when the girls learned how to do their own laundry, and just grew from there.
“You raise your children so they can leave home,” Debbie Garrison said. “We tried to impress in them that the whole point of growing up was to move away from home. So we probably weren’t the teary-eyed parents. If anything, we just thought ‘We’ve done our job.’”
That’s a perspective Kirkendoll can agree with wholeheartedly. Both child and parent need to prepare, prepare, prepare, she said.
“You have to prepare mentally,” she said. “You have to prepare physically. You have to prepare spiritually. ... And you have to prepare them. ...
“In the Bible, it says ‘Raise a child up in the way you want him to go and when he is old he will not depart from it.’ ... You’ve trained them. Now you need to encourage them to follow through.”
It does feel a little strange to no longer plan life around the school calendar, the Garrisons admitted, or to see the school bus roll by the house without stopping.
“The bus has been part of your life for 21 years and it’s like ‘Oh. The bus isn’t stopping here anymore,” Debbie Garrison said.
Of course, in another sense, the nest is never completely empty. Both Kirkendoll and the Garrisons still have their kids living within driving distance. So they may still stop by for Sunday dinner, or drop in to do laundry, or call for help with the car registration and insurance. Dave Garrison admitted it may get a little harder if his son-in-law, a dentist, decides to go to New Jersey for graduate school.
Meanwhile, with everyone out of the house, there’s usually a lot fewer hands to do the chores. Then again, there also may be a lot fewer chores to do.
“That goes both ways,” Kirkendoll grinned. “You look at it and say ‘I can’t say this is anyone else’s mess — it’s all mine. But the flip side is, when I clean it, I know when I come home, it’ll stay that way.”
For those who do have trouble adjusting to the empty nest, a few tips may help. These were offered by Bill Burns, director of counseling services at St. Lawrence University, for the Web Site PNNOnline:
F Recognize that a change has occurred and that it’s normal to have strong feelings about a child leaving home. It’s important to find someone to talk to, especially for single parents.
F Remember to take care of yourself. Concentrate on wellness or exercise, or start a creative project, or just resolve some problems that always had to wait “until the kids left home.”
F If you’re still feeling anxious or unhappy after several months, think about talking to a mental health professional. Depression isn’t as common among “empty nesters” as popularly believed, but it can happen.
It will probably be quieter, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Dave Garrison remembered shopping for groceries and going to dinner with his wife one night after their youngest daughter graduated high school last year and moved away from Emporia.
“Isn’t it nice not to have to be home at a certain time?” he asked her.
And of course, both families are proud of their kids and how far they’ve come.
“You’re glad they’re going to the next level,” Kirkendoll said. “And that’s so rewarding.”
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