“Tradition! Tradition!” sings Tevya in the rousing testimonial to rites of passage from “Fidler on the Roof.” Traditions mark transitions. They create community around significant life experiences. And force us to pause and take stock. Indeed, many of us have tried to initiate new traditions to commemorate neglected but major passages – such as a fiftieth birthday or a divorce.
I am thinking about all this because there are two big transitions coming up in my family’s life. One is well-marked milestone: My daughter is graduating from college this month, amid the usual flurry of robes and processions. I will surely cry more than once over the weekend at the realization that with her diploma in hand, she is officially launched into the world. I may even invoke the only insight I salvaged from my long-ago Kahlil (“The Prophet”) Gilbran period: parents are the bows that aim our children – the arrows – into their independent lives.
There is another transition connected to her graduation. It has a name, but no rituals. “The Empty Nest Syndrome” – the adjustments parents must make when children move on – is a passage without a bridge. Many emotions and choices are in play. It can be a liberating time for someone who can finally put herself first after twenty or thirty years in “the emotional management business.” It can be lonely for someone who doesn’t know how. Each parent may feel differently about it – one may be understandably (if a bit guiltily) relieved; the other bereft. Couples, thrown together on their own after years of child-rearing, are confronted with what they do and do not know about each other. Divorced or single parents will be allocating their time and emotional resources – as well as their money – in new ways too. It is hard to track our progress through all these changes. Yet this transition can be as determinative for the rest of our lives as our adolescence – a stage of life marked by an array of benchmarks from religious confirmation services to a first driver’s license.
I’m not arguing for an Empty Nest Mass or an Opened Bedroom Door Blow-out, but simply for a little more respect for the really big transition that particular readjustment is part of. We all – married or not, straight or gay, mothers or aunts, professionally rewarded or struggling to find our place – are crossing the threshold from who we were – in the world we became adults in – toward who we will be in the new stage for women that our generation is creating by living it I often meet women who are thrown by the prospect of entering a new chapter in their lives. Some see it simply as a milestone birthday that must be endured – no big deal. But it is a big deal. In the course of adjusting to the changes taking place in our bodies and our outlook on the world, most of us find ourselves reconsidering many of our priorities, reviewing our options and relationships, and confronting unfamiliar challenges.
That is why this transition takes so much longer than a simple “Welcome to Second Adulthood” party. If we respected the nature and the magnitude of the process, we would be less impatient with ourselves about figuring things out and getting on with it. The real challenge is to explore the possibilities of, as Gloria Steinem puts it, “doing unto yourself as you have been doing unto others.” And that takes time and effort and experimentation. All of us attending graduations should take note of the patience, understanding, and delight we invest in the uneven growing up process of the young and imagine offering the same kind of support to ourselves as we grow up again.