Worrying and the Empty Nest

Thoughts on The Names, Wreck, and Vladimir

Last weekend, my children were in New York visiting their dad and their baby half-sister. Their dad had booked them on a 7am flight to NYC on Friday, which meant they were on the road to the airport at 4am (the go to university in the same city.)

I was up when they were. You see, it is my sheer will power than keeps them safe on the road. I have to manage TSA lines and border security agents and global conflict and the stock market and road conditions all with my mind. Yes, it is exhausting.

I’m a worrier: always have been. I thought it might go away in this season on life but it hasn’t. In fact, I think it’s intensified because I am not in control of these little people I birthed but am still as tethered. How does one untether? It’s impossible.

While my children were traveling, I finished Florence Knapp’s debut novel, The Names. (I love the debut novels of midlife women) which got a lot of buzz last year. The premise is a mother goes to the registry office to give her newborn son a name: Gordon, like his domineering father; Julian, meaning Sky Father, to show deference but also some independence; or Bear, the name her 9-year-old daughter prefers. The books follows the family over a couple of decades imagining how the decision around his name changes the trajectory of their lives. It’s a heartbreaking book and I’m always a little wary of authors who write about domestic violence without that lived experience since it’s so easy to misunderstand. To be clear, I liked the book and admired the writing, but at times, I wondered: what is this book actually about? (I’m doing a course with CeCe Lyra on Psychological Interiority and am now reading commercial fiction like the English major I once was.)

The acknowledgements pay tribute to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Empty Nest, which starts:

Dear child, the house pines when you leave.

I research whether there is any bird who grieves

over its empty nest.

Ahhh. Got it. The novel is about children growing up. It’s about wondering about all of these big and little decisions we make along the way and how (or even if) they impact the way things turn out for our children. I returned to some of the passages I highlighted from the perspective of the child’s mother:

She suspects that, to be a good parent, she must pack away the mothering part of herself into a box and gently close the lid on it. She had not realized this is what would be required of her, had not seen it coming.

Ooof. I did not realize this either. I’m still in the denial stage of this. She observes a second stage of parenting and what might happen if one does not make the transition.

She hadn’t known there would be a second reckoning, where this would eventually mean laying down the arms of motherhood: caution, foreseeing, checking, reminding, nurturing, openly caring. Because a switch had been tripped, and rather than keeping the child safe, if left in sight, her love might implode. Might overwhelm him.”

I don’t know if I believe her but these passages certainly resonated as I tried to control the weather and global politics with my brain. I’ve not laid the worry down yet. I’m not sure if I every will

I then dove into Catherine Newman’s Wreck. I was not a huge fan of Sandwich even though most Gen X empty nesters love it. I didn’t love the protagonist. She tries too hard to be cool but I think I’m more of a secret Boomer at heart. Ethel Kennedy is a psychological mess but she sits up straight and wears ironed linen. In Sandwich, I found myself being very judgemental: seriously, this is stressing you out? But I’d heard really good things about Wreck, and even though it’s the same cast of characters, the praise was not wrong.

In this book there are problems. I found myself much more invested in the story and in the middle aged narrator, Rocky. The book is also about maternal anxiety in the empty nesting years as the narrator wrestles with her serious health problems and her kids’ and parent’s problems, while she distracts herself by fixating on a local death that may or may not have been accidental. It’s really good. She’s anxious and worries she has passed her anxiety on to her children. That, I understand so well. She talks about how hard it is to parent in the adult years:

To have a child is to have your heart go walking around outside your body fo the rest of your life - so the saying goes. Not a pink bubble of a heart, but the bloodied organ itself, dragged through the gutter behind a team of wild horses, returned to you in tatters if at all.

She recognizes that you can’t protect your kids from everything since - at some point, if all goes well - their world is bigger than yours. And at some point, you kind of just have to be OK with it.

It brought me back to The Names, which has an almost nihilistic bent that is both disheartening and weirdly freeing as a mom. Maybe no matter what we do as mothers, it really does not matter at all. As a worrier, this brings me comfort. Maybe I do not need to stay awake all night to keep their plane in the air.

Then, for something completely different, I watched the adaptation of Vladimir on Netflix. It’s a things-fall-apart-in-midlife book and series but boy do these people have a different mindset than me. The cast is wonderful. It’s a love letter to books. Rachel Weisz has excellent hair and wardrobe. The house is bougie. Leo Woodall is shirtless. There are lots of good things going on. But did I connect with it like the books? I did not. Still, it’s worth watching while you gather up your tax stuff.

Because I was on a family dysfunction tear, I then read the first 100 pages of Lost Lambs. It’s an “internet novel” (whatever that means) according to an article in The Atlantic, and maybe that’s why I don’t get it. I felt the same way I felt about Saltburn. It’s certainly zeitgiesty and it’s well written (I think?) It reminded me of someone’s MFA project albeit from an excellent program and school, and I think you have to be in the mood to enjoy that type of thing. People compare it to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, which I also did not like, so maybe I just don’t like the genre. It’s just not my cup of tea, which means it will win all the big prizes. At the end of the day, I really just want to read about wealthy housewives in good cashmere murdering people who deserve it.

Have you read or watched anything good lately?

Xx