Long ago on a visit to the Vineyard, at an afternoon party in a charming cottage off Lambert’s Cove Road, a woman with a little girl at the West Tisbury School explained it to me: “We want what’s best for our daughter, of course, so we hope she’ll go away to college, get a sense of the endless horizons out there, spread her wings, and find a profession in an exciting city. And that’s going to break our hearts.”
More recently I heard another mother express it this way: “We raise our kids to lose them to the world.”
That’s not to say that a number of Island kids don’t stay, although the staying part, more often than not, comes after at least a stint in college, maybe a couple of jobs in a metropolitan area, before the siren song of the Vineyard calls them home. So nowadays we’re talking less about staying, and more about returning.
In olden times, Island kids were lucky if they’d spent an overnight in New Bedford. Today, with many a childhood filled with travel (and not only to Orlando), and with an up-to-date high school churning out trips to the four corners of the planet, our children acquire a taste for high adventure, and they’ve launched their own diaspora: this kid digging wells in Rwanda, another clerking for a law firm in London, an Ivy League college grad raising pigs in North Carolina, another coaching fitness training in Beverly Hills.
Some Island mothers take their children’s “’bye, Mom!” harder than others (it must have something to do with our oxytocin levels). Amy Reece of Oak Bluffs, author and teacher at the charter school, has three kids. The youngest, Lily, an aspiring filmmaker, is conveniently close to home at Emerson College in Boston. Also convenient to Mom and Dad is eldest child Ellie, with a fine job as a hospital administrator, only a T stop away from kid sis. Inconvenient, however, is distant son Sam, all the way out in Wyoming, where he pursues real estate during the workweek and, with every spare moment, follows his bliss up those nearby mountains to ski and snowboard.
“He’s mad about mountains,” sighs Amy, and she doesn’t have to bemoan the fact that there are no mountains on our Island, not even respectably high hills. Amy and husband Doug, however, devised a brilliant plan to spend time with their flat-landscape-aversive son: Last January all three of them climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa.
And yet parents often find relief when the last child packs that suitcase. Best-selling author Susan Wilson of Oak Bluffs, happily married to David, English teacher at the high school, says, “I’m incredibly proud of my launched children.” Elizabeth, married, living in Milton with two little kids, has a master’s degree in career counseling, and Alison, also married, with a baby boy, owns a dressage-training stable in Amherst.
Susan says, “I think of kids as a catch-and-release commodity. You get them for 18 years.”
I pointed out that this was easy to say since her daughters hadn’t sailed off to Timbuktu; they live a mere half-day’s drive away. Susan agreed, but explains, “I’ve never been particularly sentimental.” She also added that on Mother’s Day she and David celebrate by “cracking open a bottle of wine.”
Even Amy, pining for her mountaineering son, sees the positive side of the empty nest: “The worry is lessened because one really has no control, and there’s more time and space in your head — the part that was worried about them ending up in a ditch on a Saturday night — for other, more creative endeavors.”
It is a mite harder, it seems, for many widowed, divorced, or single-from-the-get-go moms to have kids at a distance. Photographer Adrianne Ryan of Vineyard Haven raised her daughter in New Jersey, with frequent trips with her then-husband to their Chilmark summer home. In the past few years, Adrianne, now split from her husband, has househopped on the Vineyard looking for a place to make her own, ideally with a guest bedroom for her daughter.
Last fall she purchased a Tashmoo condo in the woods of West Chop. “Up until now my only shot at seeing my daughter has been to visit her in Brooklyn. It’s great fun, though! I’ll pop in for four or five days, we’ll order takeout Thai food and sit up on her sofa watching movies. I’m hoping this summer she and her boyfriend will settle in with me for a while on the Island, now that I have space for them.”
On a more wistful note, Adrianne observes, “Families have become so atomized. It’s not acceptable to talk about it as a loss, but it is. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss my daughter and the intimacy and mutual support of family.”
And gee whiz, that’s where my own experience comes in. In 2002, my son, Charlie, pushed off for B.U., and his dad Marty and I separated. I found myself saying to people, “It feels like bereavement. No wait! — it is bereavement!” After college, in pursuit of a show business career, Charlie moved to L.A. for seven years. Last year he and his soulmate girlfriend Cary decided a transfer to New York would be just what the doctor ordered — in Cary’s case literally, having just earned her doctorate in physical therapy; she now works at Sloan Kettering.
Charlie has a decent-paying day job as an executive assistant, and by night he cruises the comedy circuit for standup appearances. He also writes op-ed pieces and screenplays.
Is it still bereavement having him at a couple of hundred miles remove? One factor mitigates against it. As we Islanders know, it’s always easy to get loved ones to come see us, even as we overlook the fact that the Vineyard lures them more than we do. Would we be quite so irresistible living in Dubuque?
The point is, the kids are all right. They’re all grown up and remembering to brush their teeth and tie their shoes. Now it’s our turn to mature. That could mean not loving our children less but, now that we’ve got more time cleared on our dockets, making an effort to love everyone in the whole dang world a drop more.
Now there’s a golden goal for Mother’s Day.
And let’s not forget Susan Wilson’s method: Crack open that bottle of wine!
Make mine prosecco.