Empty Nests, Then and Now
It is hard to improve on Homer for a description of a ritual that is about to take place all across the country:
They cried out, shrilling cries, pulsing sharper than birds of prey—eagles, vultures with hooked claws—when farmers plunder their nest of young too young to fly.
Every fall, hundreds of thousands of families participate in the same ritual. In the past few weeks, parents have said goodbye to their sons and daughters as they dropped them off at college. It can be a heartrending experience, especially if the child is the first to leave the nest. If it is the last child, the pangs may be more intense since mother and father are now on their own. (Parents with only one child experience whiplash, I suppose.)
The empty nest was not quite the sociological norm until relatively recently. In many times and places, extended families living in multigenerational households have been the default. The ancient Roman custom of patria potestas (literally, “power of the father”), whereby a father exercised absolute, lifelong legal authority over his children no matter their age, was practicable in part because offspring remained in the household into adulthood or until marriage, in the case of daughters.
Nevertheless, empty nests are probably about as old as the nest itself. And they’re always emotionally complicated, though the situation is rarely as difficult as it was for Adam and Eve who, after Abel’s murder and Cain’s exile to wander the earth, had a third son, Seth, about whom the Bible says little. Noah’s three sons stayed close to their parents—by necessity—until they went out to repopulate the earth after the flood. As for Abraham, the Book of Genesis is famously reticent about any inner turmoil when, without warning, God asks him to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac, only to reveal later that it was a test. According to Genesis, Abraham and Sarah never meet again after Isaac’s close call—she is dead when her name next appears in the story—no doubt forestalling what would have been a very conflicted relationship for the would-be empty nesters.
Perhaps because they are so atypical, these biblical examples do not resonate with me as strongly as the case of Odysseus and his son Telemachus. Homer, in Book 16 of The Odyssey, compares their pathos to the cries of birds whose young have been snatched from the nest. Odysseus had been absent for twenty years, ten while fighting the Trojan War and ten more while wandering the Mediterranean, prevented by natural and supernatural forces as well as by his own weaknesses from getting home to Ithaca. Telemachus was a babe in arms when he last saw him. In order to survive the hostile forces against him, Odysseus became an accomplished teller of tales, concealing his identity when it might prove fatal. An exceptionally good liar, he arrived at his home incognito but finally told the truth about his identity—and his son didn’t believe him. Eventually, Telemachus could not deny the truth that was, quite literally, staring him in the face. Father and son, reunited at last, shared a bittersweet embrace.
Their joy is understandable. In comparing their tears to those of a bird whose fledglings have been stolen by humans, however, Homer’s simile accentuates something traumatic. One’s first instinct is perhaps to see their emotion, like that of parents bidding farewell to their college-bound children, as an expression of intense nostalgia. Memories of love and laughter, of milestones and disappointments, the good and the bad—they all come flooding back, along with the often painful realization that they now belong to the past.
But this was not the case for Odysseus and Telemachus. They did not lament the disappearance of a shared past. Indeed, they shared no common memories because Odysseus was gone for Telemachus’s entire childhood. There was nothing there for either of them to remember. Rather, they were distraught over the knowledge that the time for making memories was gone forever and could never be recovered.
The distinction is subtle but significant. There are no “old times” to miss because, due to Odysseus’s absence, he missed Telemachus’s childhood. Maybe, then, it’s accusation and not denial or disbelief when, in response to Odysseus’s revelation of his identity, Telemachus cries, “You’re not my father!”
That is what I took away from the reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus when I recently taught it to a classroom of college freshmen. I have taught The Odyssey on and off for twenty years—for as long as Odysseus was gone from home—yet I did not pause over this scene until I had taken my first child to college. Homer’s epic hadn’t changed one iota—but I had. Have I been a better father than Odysseus? If nothing else, I have had the good fortune to be mostly present, and as a consequence, I am blessed with many fond memories. To be sure, Odysseus had to contend with temperamental deities, but he didn’t help matters with his propensity for distraction.
But who am I to judge? What hit me hard at the college drop-off was not a wave of nostalgia. It was the recognition of all the things that I had not done with or for my child over the preceding eighteen years that would now remain undone, forever. Books we could have read. Games we could have played. Conversations we should have had. Places we could have visited. Skills I should have taught. Most of those windows have closed, and there is nothing I can do to open them. No matter how many books and games and talks and vacations they managed, I suspect many parents might feel the same. To the extent that time, money, and energy are finite resources, I can truthfully plead extenuating circumstances. That hardly makes me special. Nor do I have Poseidon or Polyphemus or Calypso to blame for my own dereliction of duty.
If anyone older than Homer used the bird’s nest motif in a figurative sense, I have been unable to find it. His evocative imagery may seem familiar to modern readers, but this is deceptive insofar as it makes us think of the changes on the horizon for the parents whose primary child-rearing responsibilities are complete. Alas, the bard left us no sequel that follows Odysseus and Penelope as they putter about the house in Ithaca (by themselves, now that it has been cleared of suitors and Telemachus has come of age). In reality, the literary trope is backward-looking and tinged with regret.
By any standard, The Odyssey is a classic of world literature. In his 1986 essay “Why Read the Classics?” the Italian writer Italo Calvino took a stab at answering the question posed in his title. Fourteen stabs, actually, spelled out in pithy definitions with accompanying commentary. Number four states, “Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading,” which sounds like a variation on the same theme as number six: “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” Both ring true to me. I’m undecided on number eight: “A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before.” Other parents may have figured it out, but I might not have been able to understand what I was feeling or put it into words without reading Homer.
Thankfully, I have a few years to read Homer again before our third and youngest child leaves for college and we are truly empty nesters.
Image by motortion and licensed via Adobe Stock.