Voids are funny things

I

’ve often wondered what mother birds feel when their offspring are big enough to go out on their own and “fly the coop.” Does she feel distraught or depressed or need a drink or call a friend to discuss her new status of being an “empty nester”? Or does she look around, straighten the twigs, and think about a new career, or the freedom she will have to find worms without having to carry them back to feed those baby birds? Does she think about starting a new family or perhaps finding another career in the wild? (I’m not certain what alternative careers there are for female birds, but you never know….)

Which leads us to the question of human mothers facing a similar quandary. Chances are that lots of effort preceded the newly acquired status of “empty nester.” Perhaps, after she bids farewell to offspring as they leave to build their own nests, she enters a period I’ll call “straightening the nest.” Chances are that said offspring have left many possessions they promise to retrieve, supposedly, when they will have time to do some organizing — which translates to never, or when said parent announces that items left behind 30 or more years ago will be considered hefker and discarded or given to the appropriate gemach.

Human Mother may feel much nostalgia as she looks at the empty bedrooms, even as said offspring come back for Shabbos, eventually bringing along a new “child by marriage” to whom you can’t serve the frozen leftover kugel from the previous Yom Tov. This necessitates a major pre-Shabbos cooking marathon so everything is fresh and exciting.

The time to relish or dread the concept of the empty nest is often fairly short-lived.