“To be, or not to be: that is the question…”

It’s funny how differently we see life after our children have flown the coop. Before that time, we felt sure that we knew all the answers and knew exactly what life was all about. We were so caught up in raising our children and doing what we deemed as the right mothering action, we put our own futures on hold.

We worried about our children and their safely. We were tormented when we didn’t know where they were or with whom. We argued in hopes of convincing our children that we knew more than they did. We gave consequences in an effort to help them learn that there would always be consequences for their actions later in life both good and bad. We quietly supported them in ways that we never shared with them. We spent years, never taking the easy road because we wanted them to arrive into adulthood healthy, happy and successful.

We thought about nothing except our children and doing right for them. Too often our passionate devotion to motherhood had a consequence of its own. That consequence was born as a result of our neglecting preparations for our own futures. We prepared our children for adulthood but we didn’t prepare ourselves for the inevitable. After all, there just wasn’t time between carpools, the flu, chicken pox, homework, school plays, birthdays, and the like. At least, that is what we thought at the time because we knew only too well that we were so very busy.

When we heard the term “empty nest,” we pictured a mother bird watching her young fly away as she perched herself in the nest that they had previously occupied with her. We knew only too well that “the empty nest syndrome” had nothing to do with us because we were so very young and so very busy and so very conditioned or maybe even brain washed.

As most of you know, I am a fan of Country Music and I am remembering a song that was sung by Cal Smith a while back. The lyrics went something like, “Birds and children fly away…Don’t cry Mama…the only way that they come back is to go…”

So returning to my opening thought, after our children are grown, we can finally begin to plan for our futures because hopefully, now we have the time. Quoting good old William Shakespeare, “…aye, there’s the rub.” How funny is that, from Cal Smith to Shakespeare in one sentence!? Think about it my friends. Whether it’s country, Shakespeare or any other genre, it’s all the same but with different lyrics.