Click here for past issues of the Globe Magazine, dating back to June 22, 1997

Letters to the Magazine editor:
Mail can be sent to Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe, P.O. Box 2378, Boston, MA 02107-2378. The email address is [email protected] or use our form.

Spare room

You're not losing a son, you're gaining a study – but an emptying nest can still be a strain.

The bedroom has a computer in it now. There is an end table with a lamp between two chairs that look out on the basketball court with the rusting backboard in the backyard. The bookcase is lined with manuals for QuarkXPress, Photoshop, and Microsoft Word. The closet is filled with spillovers from a female wardrobe.

The only traces of the previous occupant are dusty youth sports trophies, high school athletic plaques, and framed photos showing him frozen in mid-rebound or mid-save. For 20 years, this was our older son's sanctum. Then, a few weeks after commencement, he wedged his king-sized bed into a Ryder truck and drove it to Chicago, leaving behind an empty corner of the nest and a dilemma for his parents.

Should we buy another bed and create a guest room that only would be used for a handful of nights a year? Or should we turn it into an everyday space? It wasn't a simple question of rearranging furniture. It was a symbolic statement. It was a matter of crossing a line, of saying farewell to a stage of life.

As long as his bed was in the room, it implied that the older son's absence was temporary, as it was when he was away at college. But when the bed is replaced by chairs and a computer, it says that the absence is likely to be permanent. If our son leaves Chicago, odds are he'll go to New York. Possibly, he'll come back to live with us for a while at some point, but probably not. Meanwhile, life goes on, for him and for us.

We have already stepped over the formal line by crossing out our older son's name on the town census form and on the auto and health insurance policies. Last year, we still could list him as a dependent on our taxes. This year, we can't.

It's the informal line, though, that is more unsettling to cross, because it's we who decide where to draw it and what it means. Is the older son gone for good or is he not? You cross him off the census form because the town says you have to. But if you don't replace his bed, what does that mean? That he's no longer part of the family?

The fact is, he is and he isn't. He's part of the family, but the family - four people sharing the same house day after day - doesn't exist anymore. We are reminded of that by how often the phone doesn't ring these days and by the freezer still crammed with chicken and sausage and hamburger that have been sitting there for ... how long? A couple of months? A couple of years?

The "play meat," as we called it, was a diversionary stash to keep teenage carnivores from devouring the planned dinner entree during their usual late-afternoon feeding frenzy. We haven't needed play meat in ages. So do we throw it out? Or keep it on hand until it petrifies and becomes a reminder of the Stone Age, when adolescent saber-tooths prowled the premises?

When the nest begins to empty, something as basic as cleaning out the fridge takes on end-of-an-era overtones. You can almost hear a somber voice giving a "Requiem for a Sugar Pops box": "We shall not see its like again ..."

This is all normal and logical, my wife and I keep telling each other. Our son needed a bed for his new apartment; it made sense to take his with him. We needed a place for the computer and all its accouterments. In fact, our older son moved them in himself before he left.

Still, there are times when the changeover seems like an eviction notice. Even if the room is filled with your mementos, if you don't have a bed to sleep in, you're a guest. When our son came home for the holidays, he slept on the pullout sofa downstairs.

He didn't mind; he's crashed in less comfortable venues. And he says he likes how his bedroom has been transformed. "Just one thing," said the man from Chicago. "You might want to put a futon in here."