Remember, in elementary school music class, when you were first taught to sing in a round? It was probably to “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” The teacher divided the class into groups, and each group started singing at their cue. If you went to Sunday School, then you may have learned to sing in a round to “Father, I Adore You.” This song had three sections, and so usually, the class was split into three groups. I used to love the three-part harmony that could be heard as the parts slowly wove together and then unraveled from one another by the end. But we were kids, so the result was somewhat of a mash of notes as some kids struggled to sing with their group. Letting your own voice begin to side with the wrong group’s melody was always so tempting. It would take all my concentration to stay with my side of the room all the way until the end.
Do you remember the feeling of hearing the last group sing the last section of the song, after the other groups had finished? It always felt both strange and powerful; the clamor of everyone singing at once narrowed into a singular melody, crisp and echoing while the others had gone silent. I always wanted to be the in last group so I could hear my own “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream” pull away from the rest and offer the satisfying closure we all anticipated. Or in the church version, I wanted to hear my “How I lo-ove you” take up all the space in the room, everyone listening. Everyone a bit hypnotized by what we’d just done.
What I’m getting at is that the feeling of being a last-group singer in a round is sometimes how it feels to be divorced and always how it feels when your kids move out: you can suddenly hear the sound of your own voice again, and it is both strange and powerful. It’s a jarring recovery of something that’s evidently been there all along. I just couldn’t fully hear it because of all the other voices.
In August, my youngest started college, and the day after I returned home from delivering him to campus, I found a dead robin in the yard. This is a longer story for another day, but twice — maybe three times — I’ve watched robins lay and hatch a handful of their speckled blue eggs in a nest built against my house. I watched the process start to finish during consecutive springs until we moved out of that house. What we all know happens but might never register is that when the babies leave the nest, the mother does too. The mother moves on.
For Halloween — frankly, I’m not even clear on whether this parallel was conscious — I dressed up as a raven, drawing big, black almond shapes around my eyes with liquid eyeliner and donning a black feathered skirt, gloves, and shrug that wrapped around my shoulders and shot feathers up along the back of my neck. I wore tall black boots to the party, and it was lightly snowing and terribly cold. I carefully picked my way across the street, trying hard not to slip on the ice between the car and the house.
The next morning, I woke up as myself, got on a plane, and moved back to California, closing a ten-year chapter of life in Montana. Before we took off, the plane had to be de-iced; it had snowed all night. I watched a man in the elevated bucket of a white truck spray my window with orange liquid. It was the baptism I needed, the required thaw sealing me for a sunnier future.
Maybe I shouldn’t have, but after the move, I kept looking at the app through which the security camera showed the front of my house back in Montana. My empty nest, freezing over. The house stayed empty for several weeks, and something about that satisfied me. Then one day, I saw a truck in the driveway, a woman with a dog on a leash, and I could hear more than one small child. I quickly deleted the app. I wonder if they know they are simply borrowing a nest, and that one day, those baby birds will learn to fly.
Tonight, I’m perched in a house in California, having circled back to my native territory. I’m very glad to be back, and I’m still grieving the change. My voice has narrowed into a single melody and it sounds both strange and powerful. I have so much to say. Keeping harmony with everyone else for your whole adult life takes your full concentration. I had lost a knowledge of what I sound like on my own. That I have kept singing feels like a revelation. That I like the song is an odd and miraculous recovery.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
How I lo-ove you.
You are the Beloved,
Leslie
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Thank you for this framing of voice and solitude. I have just returned from a retreat with friends who are also experiencing their children leaving the nest. And I was divorced in June 2023. The metaphors of something coming to its natural conclusion are beautiful reminders of our cyclical natures.