New Beginning - Moms Coping With An Empty Nest

I found it in a card shop hanging on a wall.

It was six years ago and my daughter was newly engaged and I wanted something special to celebrate the moment. For this was my youngest child, my baby, who was getting married, leaving home, not for a little while, not for college, or for a summer. But to fly away — with someone else — forever.

And the 8" x 10" print said it all. It was of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet, best friends, standing side by side at the end of a long, happy path. Beneath them were these words:

"Have we reached the end?" asked Pooh.

"Yes, I suppose it seems so... and yet"

"It is also the beginning."

It was a beginning for Julie. I knew this. But I believed it was the end for me.

I sang to her every night when she was small, "Stay little, stay little, little, little stay," to the tune of "Hosanna" from "Jesus Christ, Superstar." I sang to her in her cradle, in her crib, in her big-girl bed.

But the song was just a song and not a spell so she kept right on growing despite my incantation. And though it may have worked magic in some other way (she majored in musical theater and now sings and dances for a living), that song did not stop, or even slow down, time.

For my daughter was like all sons and daughters, metamorphosing even as I watched, shedding one skin for another — 8, 12, 16, 20 — a child, a teen, a grown-up, changing, evolving right before my eyes. She wasn't just one dazzling butterfly. She was an array of them, like her sister before her and like her brother, who was first.

I was used to kissing them goodbye, all of them, especially her. For she was always going somewhere — on a weekend trip with a school group, to a summer theater program, to New York for a summer, to college, to California.

She was living in New York City when she got engaged so she was already absent from her room, her home, and her old life.

But she returned sometimes. And when she did, she returned to me.

Her engagement seemed to mark the end of this. And though this was natural, leaving her father and me behind, though this is how the story is supposed to end, I was sad.

But Piglet was right. The poster was true. It wasn't an end. It was a beginning, not just for my daughter, but for me, too.

She has a baby and a 3-year-old now. And I was watching them last week, while Julie ran errands, and I saw, hung in a new place, on the wall above Charlotte's crib, the Pooh print. And I read it again and it struck me this time how true those words are. How doors close but other doors open. How an end is always a beginning.

I didn't completely understand the beauty in this that day in the card store or for so many months after. I thought my job was finished. I thought my days of mothering were over. I thought that nothing could compare with what was past because a new path hadn't been drawn yet, so I couldn't see just around the bend waiting for me, my grandchildren — Charlotte and Adam and Lucy and Megan.

But here they are. And here I am, not just with my children at my side, but with their children, too.

Not all together all the time. Not the way it used to be — all of them under the same roof every night. But sometimes. And it's good, it's wonderful, this new path that I didn't know existed. There's no dead end, rather a whole new world.

"Stay little, stay little, little, little stay," I sing to each of them now. But it’s just a song, not a prayer anymore. I don’t really want to stop time. I just want to hold them and love them and be with them and listen to them and have fun with them for as long as they’ll let me, for as long as I can.