The Smaller Table

There is a strange cruelty in the phrase empty nest.

It makes it sound abandoned. Vacant. A little bowl of sticks and straw with nobody left in it, feathers caught along the edges, wind blowing through the place where life used to be.

But that is not what this feels like.

Not exactly.

I am the father of five daughters, which means I have spent most of my adult life hopelessly outnumbered, bewildered by bathroom counters, hair products, shoes appearing in impossible places, emotional weather systems I could not always predict, and conversations occurring simultaneously at speeds the male brain was perhaps never designed to process.

And I would not trade one second of it.

For years our house has been a glorious collision of backpacks and homework and tears and laughter and slammed doors and whispered apologies and prayer and cereal bowls and missing socks and boyfriends and heartbreak and Christmas mornings and school mornings and someone needing the car and someone needing money and someone needing Dad right now.

And now, somehow, astonishingly, the little girls are women.

One has graduated from college and is married.

One has graduated and is beginning her vocation as a teacher, stepping into rooms full of other people’s children and offering them some portion of the patience and intelligence and goodness we spent years watching grow in her.

One is heading into her junior year of college to become a nurse and will be married next summer, preparing herself to enter rooms where frightened people will look at her face and hope to find compassion there.

One is beginning her freshman year at a university, standing on the lip of an enormous new world.

And our youngest, our beloved daughter with Down syndrome, is beginning her sophomore year of high school. Her story will be different. She will most likely always live with Becky and me, which means our nest will never be completely empty and, knowing her, never completely quiet either.

Thank God.

Still, something has changed.

Becky and I are standing on the other side of an era.

And I find myself asking the question fathers have probably asked since the first father watched his children disappear over the hill:

Did we do this right?

Did we launch them well?

I think this is where faith becomes terribly real.

Because parenting, eventually, becomes an act of surrender.

For years you hold their hands crossing streets. You buckle them into car seats. You check homework. You ask where they are going and when they will be home. You teach them prayers. You bring them to Mass when they complain. You talk about God when they listen and sometimes when they do not. You try to demonstrate what fidelity looks like by loving their mother imperfectly but persistently.

You spend twenty years saying, in a thousand different ways, Stay close.

And then, if you have done your job, you have to say:

Go.

There is something profoundly Catholic about that.

Christianity has never been about clutching what we love. The entire shape of our faith is gift. The Father gives the Son. The Son gives himself. Mary receives Jesus and then spends a lifetime giving him away.

Love, in the Christian imagination, does not possess.

Love prepares.

Love strengthens.

Love blesses.

And then love opens its hands.

St. Thomas Aquinas understood love as willing the good of another. That sounds wonderfully tidy in theology and considerably more difficult when the “other” is your daughter backing out of the driveway with everything she owns crammed into a car.

Because willing her good means wanting more for her than proximity to me.

It means wanting her to become who God created her to be.

St. John Paul II wrote often about the human person discovering herself through sincere self-gift. I have watched that truth become flesh in my daughters. They are not simply collecting degrees or beginning careers. They are learning how to give themselves away.

A teacher gives herself to students.

A nurse gives herself to the suffering.

A wife gives herself to her husband.

A college student begins discovering the particular shape of her gifts.

And a young woman with Down syndrome gives herself in ways the rest of us still barely understand, through affection and presence and joy and a startling capacity to remind a house full of achievement-oriented people that being loved has absolutely nothing to do with being impressive.

These are not departures from our family.

They are the flowering of it.

And maybe that is what an empty nest actually means.

Not emptiness.

Fruitfulness.

The dinner table gets smaller because the world gets bigger.

That is the bargain.

And yes, I hate parts of it.

I miss the noise.

I miss knowing everybody is upstairs.

I miss the refrigerator opening late at night and hearing sisters laughing in another room.

I miss being needed in the ordinary ways.

There is an ache in fatherhood that nobody tells you about when they hand you your first baby.

One day she will not reach for your hand crossing the street.

One day she will not need you to carry her.

One day the little girl asleep against your chest will be discussing mortgages or lesson plans or wedding flowers or clinical rotations.

And you will be proud beyond language.

And something inside you will break anyway.

Augustine famously wrote that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Perhaps parenthood teaches a related truth: our children were never meant to rest finally in us.

We are not their destination.

We are their first harbor.

A harbor is safe, but ships are built to leave it.

The measure of a harbor is not how many ships it keeps.

It is how well they sail when they leave.

So, have Becky and I launched our daughters well?

I suppose the complete answer belongs to God and to years we cannot yet see.

We made mistakes. Plenty of them.

We lost our patience.

We worried too much.

There were lectures disguised as conversations and advice offered when listening would have been holier.

There were moments when I wanted to protect them from every wound instead of trusting that Christ could meet them inside wounds I could not prevent.

But when I look at these young women, I see courage.

I see faith.

I see compassion.

I see grit.

I see humor.

I see women who know where home is without believing they must remain inside it.

And perhaps that is enough evidence for tonight.

The great thinkers of our tradition remind us that the goal of human life is not comfort but holiness, not mere success but communion with God, not self-invention but the discovery and offering of the self God created.

That is what I want for my daughters.

Not easy lives.

Full lives.

Not lives untouched by suffering.

Lives in which they know what to do with suffering.

Not careers merely worthy of applause.

Vocations worthy of love.

Not faith inherited like an old family piece of furniture.

Faith wrestled with, chosen, inhabited, questioned, deepened, and finally made their own.

So perhaps Becky and I are not entering an empty nest.

Perhaps we are entering a different kind of parenthood.

The age of influence instead of management.

Invitation instead of instruction.

Phone calls instead of carpool.

Prayer instead of control.

The table still has their places.

The house still knows their names.

Their mother still worries.

Their father still checks the weather where they are.

And God help the poor man who hurts one of them, because sanctification remains a process.

But I am learning.

Learning that silence is not absence.

Learning that an unused bedroom can be evidence of something beautiful.

Learning that a smaller dinner table can mean our love has simply acquired more tables.

A table in another home.

A table in a classroom.

A table in a nursing break room.

A table in a young marriage.

A table somewhere on a college campus.

And one here, still wonderfully occupied by a high school sophomore whose presence keeps Becky and me anchored in the sacred absurdity of daily family life.

The nest is not empty.

The nest has expanded.

It has become classrooms and hospitals and dorm rooms and marriages and futures we cannot yet imagine.

And maybe someday, God willing, there will be grandchildren running through these rooms, and once again somebody will spill milk and somebody will cry and somebody will leave a shoe directly in the middle of the hallway.

And I will realize that life did not move away from us.

It moved through us.

That may be the hidden vocation of parenthood.

To pour your life into another human being so completely that one day she has enough courage to walk away carrying the best of what you gave her and, mercifully, leaving some of your nonsense behind.

And then you stand beside the woman with whom you built this whole improbable, loud, female-filled, grace-soaked life.

You take her hand.

You look at the suddenly quiet house.

You feel the ache.

You feel the gratitude.

And beneath both, you hear the oldest invitation of faith:

Trust.

Trust the daughters.

Trust what you taught them.

Trust what they taught you.

Trust the Church that formed them.

Trust the sacraments that marked them.

Trust the God who loved them before you ever held them.

And trust that the purpose of a nest was never to remain full.

The purpose was to teach the birds that they had wings.