Empty Nest

This Friday, we move our youngest child into her dorm as she begins college - the definition of empty nest syndrome, right?  Can it still be empty nest syndrome when we're picking up the nest and moving it 7,073 miles?

We dropped Miranda off at Cornell last Friday for a 6-day pre-orientation program called Outdoor Odyssey. Right now, she's hiking, kayaking, rock climbing, and testing herself on a high ropes course. I hope she's having a blast. But this is just the preliminary, leading up to the big league drop-off this Friday.  We'll meet her back on campus with the mini-van loaded with as much of her stuff as will fit, and move her into her dorm room. Although her sisters are going to sleep-over the first night, her father and I will drive back to our cottage and leave her there.  We'll go back the next day with the rest of her stuff, do some parent stuff on campus, and then take her shopping to fill up the kitchen and get any last-minute necessities before we take her sisters and leave her on her own.

Then we'll drive back to our home in the Chicago suburbs, tie up some loose ends, and fly to Shanghai to live for the next three years. Whew!  While I have a plane ticket back to Chicago on December 2, our home there is for sale, so I hope that we'll be spending our winter break moving to a new home in my hometown of Watkins Glen, NY. We're changing everything this year:  we're selling our home after 16 years, Chris & I are renting an apartment in Shanghai, Miranda starts college, Samantha is spending the fall semester abroad, and our oldest, Elizabeth, is moving into a new apartment in NYC as well. It's a busy year in our household. 

Because my husband has been working in Asia 75% of the time for the past two years, while Miranda finished high school, she and I have been alone together a lot of the time.  For me, at least, this has been great. I have had a chance to spend some quality time, one-on-one, with my youngest daughter as a nearly-grown-up in a way that I never had the chance to do with her sisters. We have grown closer and had fun together, although the single parenting of a teenager can be challenging, no doubt. Fortunately, we have good kids and Miranda is no exception. She is smart, responsible, and thoughtful, although she is also messy, disorganized, and sometimes lazy - all within the limits of a normal teenager.  :)

I know my mother and I got closer during my four years of high school, when I was the only child left at home, so I'm sure it would have happened to Miranda and me, even if my husband wasn't traveling so much. But the fact that it was just the two of us amplified the effect. I will really miss her.  I hope that we will be able to talk often, even though she's not fond of talking on the phone, she'll be busy with college and new friends, and I'll be living in Shanghai.  It will be challenging, but I will make the extra effort to stay close to all of my daughters and I hope that they will, too.

I have lived most of my adult life, at least the last 24 years, as a mother. I have been mostly a stay-at-home mom, working part-time jobs and volunteering, in order to spend more time with my girls and raise them the way we wanted them to be raised. I loved being home, being a Girl Scout leader, volunteering at school, and being a PTA mom.  When we lived in Germany, my girls were in school and I stayed involved with Girl Scouts, volunteered at school, led a Destination Imagination team, and joined their equivalent of the PTA. But now, as we head to Shanghai, I won't have my girls or my identity as a stay-at-home mom. I can't work, partly because I have no Chinese work visa and partly because I'll be traveling, living in the U.S. when my younger two are on college winter and summer breaks. So, who will I be and what will I do, with no school-aged kids and no school at which I can volunteer?  I'm not sure what lies ahead, which is both exciting and intimidating.

Right now, I'm nostalgic for the years that had my girls living at home, but I think the future is going to be great. The girls are all planning to visit us in Shanghai, with Samantha, our middle daughter, coming with us next week before she heads to Vienna for her semester abroad. We love to travel as a family and the girls are all old enough that they can hop on a plane and come see us, visit each other, or go off to visit family and friends wherever they want to go.  Hopefully, they'll want to come home, wherever that might be.

Preparation

Whew!  Life is crazy for us right now, in the last month before moving to Shanghai for what should be 3 years.  We are helping our youngest daughter get ready to move into Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, for her first year of college.  We are helping our middle daughter, a junior at Emory University in Atlanta, get ready for her fall semester abroad in Vienna, Austria.  We are trying to sell our Elmhurst, IL home in order to purchase a new, forever, home in the Watkins Glen, NY area to be home base.  And we just picked out our apartment in the Green City area of the Pudong district, in Shanghai, China.

I hope to spend some of my time in Asia keeping a blog, as I did when we lived in Frankfurt, Germany in 2006-2008.  I'd also like to write a book, although I'm still uncertain where that will take me.  But, at least, a blog is a place to start and to keep track of our travels through Asia.

While we have signed a 1-year lease on our apartment in Shanghai and hope to be there for at least the 2 years that my nephew, his wife and 3 kids are in Shanghai, there is every possibility we will relocate to Hong Kong before our stay in Asia is over.  My husband travels extensively throughout southeast Asia, including China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, India, and, eventually, Australia.  I hope to go with him on many of these trips, so I plan to post pictures and stories of our travels throughout the area.  I think this move will be new, exciting, challenging, exhausting, eye-opening, enriching, and surreal. I will miss seeing my daughters, but given that the youngest is heading off to college and none of them would live at home, even in the U.S., I would be missing them no matter where I am.  I plan to be in Asia part-time, being at home with my youngest two when they are on winter and summer breaks from college.  And whenever I'm in the U.S., I plan to see my oldest daughter, who lives in NYC, as often as possible.

I will miss my family, but I haven't lived very near any of them since I went off to Cornell myself in 1979, so that's not really anything new either.  It will be great to be living only a few blocks away from my nephew and his family in Shanghai - I'm really excited to be able to see them often and get to be a part of their children's lives.  I also think we'll get a lot more family visiting us with them nearby.  :)

I will also miss our sweet little dog, Jinny, a 9-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.  She isn't up to the plane rides back and forth to Asia and the U.S., nor the quarantine involved in transitioning between countries, so we're having to give her away to a new family.  As long as we return to Elmhurst, we'll be able to visit her, but her sweet disposition and very low maintenance has made her a wonderful companion since we returned from Germany 5 years ago and I'll be lonely without her.

All-in-all, it's a life-changing year in our family.  My oldest daughter is moving apartments in NYC, my middle daughter is headed off to a semester in Austria, and my youngest is starting college.  We're planning to sell the home we've lived in since 1997 and leave Illinois, where we've been since 1991, except for the 2 years in Frankfurt.  While I'm very excited at the idea of our U.S. home base being back in my hometown, I haven't lived there since I was 17 and will have to develop a whole new social and volunteer life when I'm there, but it will only be part-time.  And, of course, to pick up and move to Asia is huge.  The best part of it all is that I will be able to be living with my husband most of the time, rather than only 25% of the time, as it has been for the past 2 years.  We'll be together when I'm in Asia and at least some of the time that I'm in the U.S.  He's excited not only to have me there but also to have a home in Asia, as he's been living in different hotels all over southeastern Asia for the past 2 years and is really tired of the nomad life.  It seems unlikely that he'll be assigned to a job back in the U.S. full-time at any point in the rest of his career, so this arrangement will probably be the reality of our life for the next 15 years or so, whether our part-time home is in Asia, Europe, South America, etc.  Who knows what adventures lie ahead!

Thank you for coming along with me on this next step in our life adventures.  I have to pause and think of my mother, who wanted to travel the world but never really made it further outside of the U.S. than Bermuda.  I like to think she would be really excited for me and will be coming along on all of these travels with us.