The House Grew More Alive

Once the children were in the house the air became more vivid and more heated;

every object in the house grew more alive.

(Mary Gordon)

I’ve been thinking about Empty-nest syndrome a lot lately, even though my youngest child is only eight. This fall, I’ve watched friends return from dropping children off at college. I’ve seen how the repercussions of those goodbyes quiver through their lives.


A few seem almost giddily excited to have more time with their husbands. They are taking a fresh look at their own interests, attending graduate school, or just moving room by room through their houses, finally organizing the closets and putting those pictures into albums.


Others are not so sanguine. They admit that now that the dust of a bustling family life has settled, they look across the table at their husbands and feel a lump of disappointment and loneliness throb in their chests.


This past summer, I talked about mid-life with a few women who are approaching sixty. They are smart and accomplished, and the jarring experience of finding their children grown and gone is in the rearview mirror for them.


One of them is Dale Hansen Bourke, whom I had the privilege to interview for her.meneutics, a blog published by Christianity Today magazine. When she was describing what “Empty-nest syndrome” felt like to her, I sat up and took note.


“There is a point in life when we say, ‘Wait, a minute ago I had my children here. I was making their lunches and being their mom and suddenly, they’ve left. They’re gone.’ It hits you hard,” she said. She went on. “It’s amazing how you go through the first half of your life so busy with your kids and then — it’s all gone. All the things you felt you were good at don’t matter anymore.”


I read the Mary Gordon quote, see the little foam Nerf bullets scattered under my piano bench, find a candy wrapper on the arm of the sofa, put my phone down on a sticky patch of drying, spilled juice on the kitchen counter. 


Sure, it’s messy sometimes, this life. It’s noisy. There’s brittle arguing when the little sister insists on singing the same two lines from her favorite song at full voice while the older brother sits at the computer with the periodic table of the elements in front of him, trying to figure out something about numbers of ions.


“Mom!”


It's more heated with them here. And more alive. And someday, I’ll be on the other side of this time.


And I’m glad that I've been able to savor it, at least most of the time.

Who is the "Successful" Child?

A bumper sticker announcing a child’s status as an honor roll student. Trophies lining a shelf. Notes about play dates and birthday parties and extracurricular activities cramming the space on a calendar page. A college acceptance letter hanging on the refrigerator.

How do we, as parents, define our children’s success?

Most of us want our kids to taste the success that comes from hard work, but even more than that, we want them to be forces for good in the world. 

Sometimes we can lose track - receiving a good report card or excelling at sports are easier to recognize than whether the child is a loving friend or has a curious mind.

In their book The Successful Child, parents and pediatric experts William and Martha Sears list the qualities they believe define a successful child. Happily, markers like straight-As and an armload of ribbons and trophies aren’t on the list. 

Instead, they are: 

• being able to forge “meaningful relationships with others,” 
• being empathetic, 
• being smart, healthy, and polite, 
• having confidence and joy, 
• making moral and wise choices, 
• being able to communicate well, and 
• having a healthy attitude about sexuality.

The foundation for all of these qualities, according to William and Martha Sears, is being emotionally attached to parents as babies and little children. 

Dr. Sears has co-authored several parenting books with his wife Martha, a pediatric nurse, and is credited with the development of the idea of “attachment parenting.” Attachment parenting is an approach that asserts that a strong emotional bond with parents during a child’s early life is crucial for a person’s emotional health and is a predictor for success in life. 

William and Martha Sears identify a number of “tools” for parents to use. These include breastfeeding on demand, the “family bed” or co-sleeping with children, and “wearing” infants (in a cloth baby sling) instead of keeping them in playpens, car seats, or strollers most of the time.

Early on in The Successful Child, the authors state that of all the stages in a child’s life, the most important one in terms of attachment is the period between birth and one year old. When I read that statement years ago as a new mother, I took it to heart. I wasn’t a convert to all the tenets of attachment parenting, but I incorporated many of the tools into my parenting. 

Like many parents, I picked and chose from various parenting techniques – I followed the smörgåsbord methodology. A bit of this, a bit of that.

I wore my babies in slings. I breastfed. I co-slept with my newborns until they were anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 months, depending on the child but, ultimately, “Ferberized” them all. (Richard Ferber is the author of Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems. He advocates a progressive approach regarding getting babies and children to get to sleep on their own, and stay asleep all night. I picked up the Ferber method when I witnessed close friends and their baby use it and saw them transformed from three insanely exhausted people to three happy, content ones.) Letting a child cry for a few minutes in her crib is a major no-no in attachment parenting, but was a good choice for my family. 

I recently picked up the book, The Successful Child again. This time I read it as the mother of a child adopted as a toddler. I can’t help thinking it was a glaring omission for William and Martha Sears to fail to write a chapter on attaching to a newly adopted child. I tried to imagine what I would have felt like, as a new mother of a child who was adopted, reading the book.

Some adoptive mothers can breastfeed, but many cannot. Some adoptive mothers bring their babies home as newborns, many do not. Some adoptive mothers know what their babies’ early life was like, some do not. I could hear myself and other parents of adopted children demanding of the authors: “Yes, but how can my child be The Successful Child.

There is an answer in the book, though you have to make the connection to adoptive attachment parenting yourself. The authors assert that 

“It’s never too late to practice attachment parenting.” 

They give examples of how to attach to children of all ages and how to help them grow into emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and physically healthy people.

I feel very grateful that when I adopted my child, I’d already parented three children from birth through the preschool years. I had some awareness of the developmental stages that little kids go through, of the ways I’d fail myself and my children and the means by which I’d extend grace to myself to get past such shortcomings.  All parents, including adoptive ones, can be confident that giving boundaries, providing security, and showering children with love can help to make every child – in his or her own way – “the successful child.”