The kids are here

Ciel and Iris flew in Wednesday morning. Ciel is our oldest child and Iris is their partner.

I had their flight times a little mixed up, I thought they were arriving at 8 in the evening, in which case Damien would be picking them up, but they were actually flying out of Montreal at 8 in the morning, so I was on pick up for their mid-morning Halifax arrival.

Easy airport access is something I miss about living in Montreal. Here, going to the airport is a minimum 3 hour commitment. The drive to the airport, one way, is as long as the flight from Montreal.

Last summer we emptied the nest when we moved to Nova Scotia from Montreal, where our grown kids still live. This year they’ve all had their first trips “home” for vacation time, not counting Christmas when everyone was here all at once.

A little note about “home”. The kids did not grow up in this home. We moved here after raising them. However, this was their grandparents’ home for most of their childhoods and so this place is familiar and special to them.

I love the kids’ responses to coming home. It’s been the same for all of them, happiness and appreciation for being here, both in Nova Scotia and at The Sanctuary.

It’s an effort to get here and so it can’t happen as often as everyone would like. When it does happen it’s special.

Something I really appreciate about the empty nest (ours is not a gone to university but coming home for summer empty nest, our kids have their own lives two provinces away) is how much we all appreciate each other when we are together. As homeschoolers we spent a lot of time with our children and they spent a lot of time with us. That was kinda the point.

Our context (living in a city where they could go to post-secondary school), family culture and values, and interdependence ethic was supportive of them living at home as young adults. And we are prepared now - as in we have a small apartment on the property - for grown children to return home for periods of time throughout their adult lives. (As we did with my parents, though we just all squeezed into their 2 bedroom home!)

We anticipate that in the future we will share living space with our children, as the need and opportunity arises. And I am so grateful that we have the relationship and resources to do that.

But in this life stage of living in our own homes and 1,300 km away from each other we all appreciate time spent together in a way that we didn’t while still living in the same home. This is to be expected.

This stage of our relationship with our children is very satisfying for me. I love having the freedom from responsibility while enjoying the close connection that Damien and I worked to build with them for the last 25+ years.