For parents, the nest is never truly empty.
By Robert Fulford
September 25, 2010
On Feb. 1, 1988, that always reliable trend-spotter, New York magazine, carried unsettling news on its cover: “Back to the Nest: Grown-up Children Who Move Back.” The article opened with a woman whose mid-20s daughter, running short on money, wanted to reclaim her old room in the family home. The mother was resisting. It violated her expectations. “People of 25 just don’t go home to their mothers,” she said. She was stating what seemed to her an iron rule. Then.
That may have been the first appearance of this subject as a big social problem. Today, after more than two decades, there’s still plenty of nervous talk about the failure-to-launch generation, the boomerang kids. The idea remains a killer of fond parental dreams and many North Americans haven’t yet absorbed the shock. (In some places, notably Italy, it’s much more common and more accepted.)
In the current edition of The Atlantic magazine, Michael Kinsley writes that many Baby Boomers, having paid publicly and privately for their parents’ generation to retire in comfort, now wake up to find that they are also supporting their children, into their 20s and beyond. This week’s New Yorker has a man in a cartoon saying, “I never thought I’d have to move back in with my parents.” He’s in a graveyard, sitting on the stoop of the family tomb.
Stay-around offspring exasperate parents, and can humiliate all concerned. Those who comment on it in public often imply that if young people would only try harder they could work things out for themselves and avoid being a burden. But Marni Jackson’s lively and thoughtful book, Home Free: The Myth of The Empty Nest, published today, avoids the blaming and shaming that often erupts around this subject. Her great virtue is that she comes through this experience with both her sense of humour and her love for her now 27-year-old son intact.
Jackson sets out to write about how people in their 20s “are taking their time to grow up and leave home.” She calls it a “twilight stage,” when they move out, move back in, then leave again. Naturally, she worries about the results of parental support. Do parents playing the role of landlord undermine the independence of their adult children, or are they simply helping them tackle a much tougher world than the one they faced when starting out?
An anxious mom, full of advice, Jackson can’t keep herself from meddling. She informs her son that the etiquette of applying for a job has in recent years ramped up to a level where every detail matters, even the smallest. “Did he know that?” she wondered. He did, and he tells her to give advice only when asked. Eventually, mother, father and son find ways to accommodate each other’s pride and anxiety.
Revealingly, parents dealing with these problems often sound as if they’ve been unfairly ambushed, not just by a weakened economy but by the reality of adult children. Kinsley’s phrase “wake up” suggests that parents doze off during the first 20-some years.
Parents are often caught off-guard because of their own lack of imagination and their failure to consider the future. Nobody understands, when considering parenthood, that you can’t have babies and you can’t have children. All you can have are human beings. These creatures grow old and remain permanently attached.
Like most long-term projects, parenthood involves more thought and effort than anyone expects; fortunate parents will know their children through many phases, into their 50s, even 60s. In my experience, this is more enriching than almost anything else on Earth. In any case, the nest never really empties (one of Jackson’s points).
Parents are likely to be disappointed if they believe that each generation will function much like the one before (only better, ideally). The complicated fact is that family structures change constantly and always have. They shift unpredictably, affected by everything from new technology and economic failures to widespread divorce and falling birth rates.
I grew up in a three-generation household: children, parents and one grandmother. My mother grew up in a three-generation household: children, mother and one grandfather. No one thought these arrangements odd. If we could accept the truth that civilization never stops changing, we might be less rattled when things fail to work out exactly as we’d hoped.
National Post
robert.fulford@utoronto.ca
To link back to the original article click here.
If you want to hear the podcast of Shelagh Rogers’ interview with Marni, Nov. 22nd, go to The Next Chapter on CBC.
Praise for Marni Jackson
Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign
Finalist for the Writers’ Trust Pearson Award for Nonfiction
Globe & Mail Top Ten List for “Books Overlooked by The Prizes”
“Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign” is a work of real originality and freshness, full of insights that seem both startling and obvious.” –Oliver Sacks, M.D.
“Jackson’s book is a timely and necessary contribution to this important dialogue.” –The Globe & Mail
“Jackson’s compelling voice, in turns perfectly ironic, intrigued, and introspective, carries readers through no fewer than 33 chapters. Her vibrant curiosity and fearless theorizing makes this book far-reaching in scope, interest and, yes, profundity.” –Vancouver Sun
“[Pain will] impart a few invaluable lessons and allow a few opportunities to empathize with others, cringe in recognition and even laugh out loud. In brief and highly readable chapters, Jackson explores the history of pain and the various philosophies and studies that have attempted to understand and tame it.” –Winnipeg Free Press
“Given that this medicalized, pain-ridden society is ours for a while, we had better keep this book beside the bed and absorb its comfort and compassion in large doses.” –Kingston Whig-Standard
“Engrossing. Jackson, a skilled and sensitive writer, argues that science must learn to listen and respond and that doctors need to look beyond isolated symptoms to find the underling story.” –Edmonton Journal
“In Pain:The Fifth Vital Sign, Marni Jackson bravely tackles one of the most misunderstood and elusive subjects known to mankind. In so doing, she gives words to something that stubbornly defies language. This has to be one of the most difficult literary tasks imaginable. An important book.” –NOW magazine
“Absorbing. If all her new book did was inform readers about this unexplored terrain, then Pain:The Fifth Vital Sign would be worth reading. But it does much more: it entertains, challenges and, ultimately, enlightens.” –Gazette (Montreal)
“[Pain] is a good read. It is comprehensive, intelligent and balanced. It puts a human face on pain, but clearly elucidates concepts as well. And it provides unexpected byways, never allowing the reader to become bored. The reader can never be sure what will be just around the corner on this journey. –Hamilton Spectator
“A good read, it identifies key issues in contemporary knowledge and the management of pain.” –American Pain Society
“Jackson explores the many meanings of pain in a finely layered piece that folds together personal narrative, science, history and culture.” –Toronto Star
“Far-reaching and idiosyncratic … Jackson is the ideal guide for this exploration. With her personal and personable perspective, she acts as a surrogate for the reader, simplifying complex issues … and humanizing often abstract concepts. Jackson leavens this very serious subject matter with a wicked and subversive sense of humour.” –Quill & Quire
“An utterly engrossing, strangely uplifting journey into the dark but wondrous corners of human suffering. By giving language to a subject that seems to defy language, Marni Jackson performs a kind of miracle of insight and compassion…a groundbreaking book by one of the most original writers at work today.” –Barbara Gowdy, author of The White Bone
“This is not a how-to pain control book … nor does Jackson attempt to cover the gamut of pain. Instead, she has written a breezily readable social history of pain. Recommended.” –Library Journal
“Many patients and physicians have wished for a way to quantify pain as we do the other vital signs: blood pressure, temperature, heart beat, and respiration. Jackson explores the history, variety, acknowledgment, and treatment of pain, the fifth vital sign, accessibly and sympathetically, lending the subject personalism by citing her own experiences of pain, which range from a bee sting to her open mouth to anesthetic failure in the middle of a dental operation. She also mines the medical annals, citing such authorities as S. Weir Mitchell and William Livingston, and various literary works. Her interviews with pain experts make lively reading as she queries the likes of Angela Mailis of the Comprehensive Pain Program in Toronto, and Frank Adams, who was found guilty of ‘medical incompetence and unprofessional conduct’ for humanely treating his patients’ pain … A book for medical-school and hospital as well as public libraries.” –Booklist
The Mother Zone: Love, Sex and Laundry in the Modern Family
“A bouquet of empirical opinions and reminiscences of about all the many small moments that make up the mothering process.” –Sunday Globe
“Humourous, frank and passionate… Entertaining and gutsy, her account will warn and console parents.” –Publishers Weekly
“A wonderful memoir of what motherhood is really like…fun to read, eye-opening, humourous and exasperating.” –Library Journal
“[A]n exuberant, generous-hearted book about the experience of motherhood and the impact of that experience on her life and work … The writing is intelligent, reflective and touchingly brave … Jackson possesses a novelist’s eye and ear.” –The Globe & Mail
“An intimate look at an evolving relationship and a startlingly honest self-portrait of an intelligent woman growing older and wiser….Jackson makes a major contribution towards restoring the dignity that mothering children deserves.” –Maclean’s
“A witty and honest account of the strange isolation, the mingled joys and madness of motherhood…funny, tough and relentless, pushing each thought as far as she can bear.”
–Toronto Star
“Truly one of the most enjoyable reads of the season…Jackson makes the pages crackle in the manner of Fay Weldon or Nora Ephron.” –ROB Magazine
“You’ve got to read The Mother Zone.” –Kingston Whig-Standard
“A terrific book…Jackson concocts a refreshing tonic out of the comedy of errors we call family life…a treat for weary parents of either sex.” –Quill & Quire
“Delightful…funny, touching, reassuring, a revelation. The Mother Zone is a marvelous combination of personal experience tempered by intellectual observation… flashes of recognition occur on every page…a must-read for all modern mothers.” –Books in Canada
“I was hooked…Jackson’s writing is so succinct, so perceptive and flows so easily that it keeps the reader enthralled…her themes are so universal that anyone who has ever been a mother, had a mother, knows a mother, will know exactly what she’s talking about.”
–Kitchener-Waterloo Record
“It reads like a novel, as intimate as a poem…With a gift for metaphor, good humour, and remarkably honesty [Jackson] calls up the feelings and minutiae of motherhood…This wonderful self-portrait of emotional life in the mother zone provides solace and surprises from start to finish.” –Kirkus Reviews
“A worthy companion to Dr. Spock on every parent’s bookshelf.” –Chatelaine
“It is hard to find anything that conveys the complex emotional truth about being a mother – the rage, the tenderness, the loss of self, the paralyzing fear, the numbing drudgery…The exception may be Marni Jackson’s new book, The Mother Zone… This book, with its humour, depth and compassion, could be a long-overdue manifesto for mothers, the beginning of an undeclared revolution.” –Ottawa Citizen
“Irresistibly funny… Poignant insight and a style that lured me to read the thing at stoplights… Drop all your preconceived ideas about mothering at the front cover… Marni Jackson’s first-hand account of motherhood deserves a category all its own.”
–Charlotte Observer
“Jackson is truthful and hits female feelings right on the head.” –Calgary Herald
“The Mother Zone is filled with the kind of insights you’ll never get from Dr. Spock… Jackson is by turns tender and ruthless, unashamedly sentimental and fearlessly self-mocking… Her observations are often hilarious.” –Family Practice
“Reading Jackson’s book was like a re-run of my own alternatively dark and euphoric thoughts, only put in extremely eloquent, poignant, why-didn’t-I-say-that language.”
–Victoria Times-Colonist
“You can be a sensitive male and motherhood will still be the dark side of the moon. This book takes you there.” –NOW Magazine
“Jackson gives readers back to themselves, the best thing a book can do.” –Edmonton Journal
