For five years, I was the mother of just one child, a daughter, until our second child was born. Throughout those five years, everything, everything (everything!) revolved around her, shaped by what we believed she needed, by her health and her development. Everything was about her.
I became a mother very young, at 26, still a child myself. I handed in my last seminar papers while breastfeeding and sat at the computer at all hours with a baby on my shoulder, trying to finish my bachelor’s degree in time to go straight on to a master’s degree.
When enough time had passed and I had forgotten a little of how hard it was, I agreed it was time for her brother to arrive. He did, and it was hard in a different way. Above all, it was complicated, because now there were two of them. My heart expanded with extraordinary growing pains, and everything that happened with him was inevitably connected to her too, influenced by her, the pioneer.
When our sweet youngest daughter arrived, the middle child was still a toddler. It had been complicated, yes, but it had also been a party, and we were a nice little gang. By the time she came, we parents were outnumbered. Our youngest entered a life already in motion and full of events, where it was almost impossible to separate the variables and the voices. Maybe that is why I stayed home with her far longer than I had planned.
And now everything is turned around. Our Na’ama has spread her wings and started university. She is close to home, but she lives in the dorms, and her life, and all of ours, have changed so much. Amid all the preparations, we never had a chance to understand what this would be like for us. Maybe, as with a first birth, you cannot really prepare for a fledgling to leave the nest. It is hard to give this change our full attention, because two other children are still here, living through it too, alongside the other challenges of adolescence and life in general. Perhaps this is the first time something dramatic that is happening only to her has been felt this way. Once again, it is hard to separate the variables and voices, hard to hear myself, and even hard to cry during this joyful adjustment. Yet this is the very thing we raised her for, nurtured her for, and worked so hard for all these years: to see her spread her wings and tail and fly with confidence and grace into the future she will make for herself, and into a wide world lucky enough to welcome her. As ever, she is full of ambitions and dreams, finding new ways to channel her initiative, leadership, desire to change things, and desire to do good for humanity. Nothing less.
And I am already thinking ahead. In five years, we will be here again. Later, our youngest, born into a big party, will remain here as an only child, just as her sister once was. Everything will revolve around her, until she too takes confident flight into the world and the nest empties.
I still cannot believe that one morning, the empty nest simply became part of my life. It will take me time to absorb it and grow used to it. Pride and the deep joy she brings me will help carry me through the difficulty, and so will art. Art will be there for me like a strong, closely woven safety net, stretched tight between thick trees, like the hammocks we wove in the Scouts. We slept in them, one above another, unafraid of falling. In them we had our most intimate conversations, gazing at the stars until we fell asleep. We dreamed of different days, without an army and without wars, as the founding generation had promised us. We dreamed of lives worth living, with certainty, safety, fulfillment and meaning. A clear understanding of it all.
There is still a long road ahead, full of unexpected turns. It holds many processes of acceptance and grief, alongside building anew and restoring what has been destroyed. It also holds a widening of the heart and a renewed faith that we will love and be loved here too, that we have a place, or that one day we will.
