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Sometimes I Feel Like a Siblingless Child Now that both my children have left for college I marvel at how such an inappropriate metaphor as the empty nest has taken hold. "Empty nest" is all wrong. No one has ever seen a bird mope about a nest after the departure of its young. The parent birds are off like a shot. How can a few weeks out of a spring and summer be compared with eighteen years of proximity to a child? During those years the child has grown toward adulthood; the parent has left his or her own youth behind and entered middle age. By the time a son or daughter leaves, he or she is no longer a child for whom everything must be done but a loved companion, a person of ideas, interests, and opinions. Dearer than the most amusing house guest and far more intimate than that, what the grown, ready-to-Ieave-home child has become is an ideal sibling. What is more logical to say, therefore, than that what the parent of the last departing child feels is the loneliness of a newly created only child? I grew up an only child but hardly knew it. For years I lived my after-school days and part of my evenings at my grandparents' house. It was full of children-my aunts and uncles. I knew they weren't my brothers and sisters, but I felt as if they were. My mother was the firstborn and my grandmother had gone on bearing a long time, so that my youngest aunt was only a few years older than I. In the bad old days before family planning, such things were possible-serendipitous for me if not for my grandmother . When we moved away I became what I was-an only child. Having discovered that truth I became one with a vengeance. I read read read in my room, kept diaries, wrote stories about lonely 185 186 LIFE NOTES pieces of paper blowing in the street below my window, until my mother accused me of acting like a boarder in the house. A student of mine recently explained why she'd had to miss a class: Her daughter had left to go to college. "I know how you feel," 1 said. "No, you don't," she answered. Then she told me what had happened. Her daughter, a shy and studious young woman, had driven to her college at the beginning of the term and found that her roommate's boyfriend had moved into their dormitory room. Shocked and confused, her daughter had turned around and driven home again, a matter of four hours. When her mother asked why she hadn't told the roommate that such behavior was unacceptable, her daughter replied, "I couldn't embarrass her." They decided together what to do. Mother and daughter drove to school, called the roommate aside and worked it out. The mother laughed ruefully in telling all this to me. "There was a minute there when 1wished my daughter was tough enough to fight it out herself. But 1 guess what 1 did was raise the kind of person I like to have around me. She's sensitive and considerate. I'm not going to complain. God, do I miss her!" That's it, 1 thought. We raise the kind of people we want to have around, and when they leave we're bound to ache at their gomg. Let me be sure no one will take the sibling idea to mean 1 equate parenthood with palship. While my husband and 1 carried the burden of the full nest-feeding, clothing, teaching, reminding, guiding, nagging, yelling, and mentioning now and then that we'd had it up to here-we were parents, not siblings. But toward the end of that span there came a moment, lasting several years, in which my son and daughter were an ideal sister and brother to me. 1worked at home, and by three o'clock, when 1 was ready to stop, in walked this charming, witty pair. They filled my head with stories from their high-school world, did hilarious imitations that cleansed me with breathy laughter or, sometimes, groaned me their groans while I groaned them mine. When one of them studied physics, as I had not, or when they read ahead of me in history and philosophy, they let me ask questions like a child who hasn't had a chance to study these...

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