The Seventeen-Banana Adjustment
Just when I have finally adjusted to the size of my weekly grocery shop, there are two enormous duffle bags by the front door.
Apparently, they are leaving. Again.
This should not come as a surprise. They came home for the summer with return tickets, university plans. At no point did anyone suggest that this arrangement was permanent.
And yet, sometime between May and August, my mind quietly revised the terms. The milk began disappearing at a familiar rate. The washing machine returned to full-time employment. Shoes multiplied inside the front door. I learned that 17 bananas is not an unusual number of bananas to buy.
Or perhaps it is unusual. I no longer know.
Before they came home, I would buy four bananas. Sometimes five, if I was feeling unusually confident about the week ahead. This summer, I have stood in the produce section gathering bananas by the armful while other shoppers looked at me as though I ran a small primate sanctuary.
Seventeen bananas. Four litres of milk. Two loaves of bread. Eggs in quantities that suggest either a large family or a minor catering operation.
At first, I could not get the calculations right. I would return from the grocery store with what appeared to be a substantial amount of food, only to discover the next morning that we had no milk. Or bread. Although I had spent enough money to expect a fully stocked pantry.
Then, gradually, I adjusted. I bought more. I cooked more. I remembered the meals they liked. I learned that dinner for three requires more planning than dinner for one, particularly when two of the three may announce at 5:12 that they are going out.
My house expanded to contain them.
Not physically, of course. Physically, it became considerably smaller. There were dirty socks in the entryway, glasses in every room and towels undergoing mysterious journeys that never ended on a hook. The dishwasher was always either running, full or waiting for someone to admit that it needed to be emptied.
There was noise from downstairs at hours when reasonable people were asleep. Doors opened. Doors closed. Someone showered. Someone could not find a charger. Someone was hungry. Always hungry.
The house was untidy, expansive and alive.
It took me several weeks to stop noticing every disruption. Then, just as I had stopped noticing, the duffle bags appeared.
They are very large duffle bags. The sort of bags that make a departure look less like travel and more like an extraction. They sit by the front door, packed with clothing I remember buying and towels I suspect belong to me.
Around them, there are discussions of flights, leases, course schedules and Thanksgiving.
“See you at Thanksgiving,” one of them says.
Thanksgiving. This seems impossibly far away.
I understand the calendar. I know Thanksgiving is only several weeks away. But there is something about hearing your child say “See you at Thanksgiving” with the casualness of someone who does not realize that Thanksgiving sounds very different to the person being left in the house.
I am not dramatic about their departures. At least, not externally.
I help find the missing things. I ask whether they have packed enough socks. I remind them about documents, medication and chargers. I provide logistical information they have not requested and will not consult. I ask what time we need to leave.
I make one final grocery trip, although buying food for someone who is leaving is an advanced mathematical problem. How much milk will be consumed between now and Tuesday morning? Are six bananas too many? Will anyone eat the grapes? Should I buy the cereal they like, even though there will be three-quarters of a box left behind for a person who does not like it?
The household is already beginning to contract. There are fewer showers to coordinate. Fewer shoes by the door. Small piles of belongings vanish from rooms and reappear inside bags. The refrigerator empties. The laundry slows.
And I begin the reverse adjustment: trying to remember how I lived before my nest expanded again for the summer.
What did I eat? How did I spend my evenings?
I know I had a life. A full one, even. I worked. I wrote. I saw friends. I played tennis and went to yoga and ate meals that did not require me to consider whether anyone else would find them sufficiently substantial.
I enjoyed the order. There were no dirty socks in the entryway unless they were mine, in which case I knew how they got there and had only myself to resent. The grocery shop was smaller. The dishwasher ran less often. A carton of milk could remain in the refrigerator long enough for its expiry date to become relevant.
There were also fewer spontaneous conversations in the kitchen. No one came upstairs late at night to tell me something they had just remembered. No one explained an aspect of football with such intensity that their eyebrows appeared to be providing a second commentary. No one stood in front of the open refrigerator asking whether we had any food while blocking the view of all the food.
This is how it is with adult children coming home. You do not return to the old family life. You create a temporary new one.
They are not the children who once lived in those bedrooms. They have their own schedules, friendships, opinions and plans. They come home carrying versions of themselves developed elsewhere. They sleep late. They come and go. They are independent except when they need a ride, a meal, an appointment made or the precise location of an item directly in front of them.
You are not parenting them in quite the same way. But you are still their mother in exactly the same way.
The arrangement is provisional from the beginning, which does not prevent it from becoming ordinary.
That may be the particular trick of summer. For a little while, the house fills again. Then the bags are packed.
This is not the first time they have left. That should make it easier. In some ways, it does. I know the house will settle. I know I will find my routines again. I will remember what I like to cook when no one else is being consulted. I will stop buying milk as though preparing for an emergency.
There are things I will enjoy. The quiet. The order. The astonishing lifespan of a loaf of bread.
But each departure feels slightly different because each return was different. They came home older. They are leaving older still. And so am I.
Perhaps this is what the empty nest actually is, not one dramatic departure, but a series of expansions and contractions. They leave. They return. They leave again. And, I’m never sure if this is the last time. Each time, the house changes shape around them. Each time, I do too.
For now, there are still duffle bags by the door and a few bananas left in the bowl.
I am trying not to buy more. Seventeen suddenly seems like too many.
~ Danielle