Reclaiming the kids’ room when they leave the nest

Coming a Full Circle

Now, of course, I am at the other end of this equation. In a few weeks, my daughter will move to college. We haven’t started packing her things, but mentally, each time I enter her room, I am auditing what will stay and what will go. This, despite the fact that my daughter has been in a boarding school in India for five years, followed by two years of high school in the US. This process is familiar to us, we have done this many times, yet there is something about going to college that makes this time different. In the past, I always held out for the possibility that she will perhaps stay home for some of her education. But now that she is going to college in the UK, the chances of her coming to live with me for an extended period of time is remote. And so, the question about space. ‘Empty Nest’, I am beginning to realise, is a factor of time, not space.

August is empty nest season, and so it was not difficult to find a support group of fellow parents preparing to send their children away to college. Very few had immediate plans for re-decorating their homes and incorporating the child’s room into a new set-up, but most thought they would eventually do something. Sending your child out into the world is painful enough, and so the parental need is to have fewer changes, not more. It will likely take a few months, a couple of years even, before practical considerations trump over emotional ones.

Future Plans

Priya Mehta, whose son is going to the Netherlands for his graduation though, is planning on a “creeping acquisition”, and is going to use him room for her online meetings. “I currently use my dining table, but it is in the middle of the house and therefore has never-ending traffic of people walking back and forth. Even though I have my back to a wall and these people don’t show up on camera, it is very distracting,” she says. Her son’s room is at the end of the house, and her plan to is to clean up a shelf that is right behind his desk and add some flowers and a painting there and use that as her “zoom cabin”, while leaving the rest intact.

In Gurgaon, Purba Ray, whose daughter is 30, is a veteran of the ever-changing dynamics of the room war. She still maintains the room as her daughter’s, she says, because she can afford it. However, some creeping acquisitions occur. “Recently my husband put an exercise machine there, and my daughter was angry. It’s a fight over territory, my daughter has marked that room as hers even if she doesn’t live there.” Every once in a while, Ray goes in and throws out junk and old clothes and things that are unlikely to be used. There is a bit of give and take in the family’s relationship with the room.

When I bought and decorated my house a year ago, I had assigned the second bedroom as my daughter’s, and had her sign off on its creative direction. Even then, I knew she was unlikely to be a long-term occupant of the room. But, through all the life-altering changes her young life has gone through, a parental separation, and boarding school life, the one constant she has always had is coming home to her room. It was her space, a place she can anchor her life to and live with the certainty that no matter where she is in the world, there’s always a room for her in her mother’s home. And so, being a good mother, I will not be re-purposing her room. However, I can’t help eye the ample cupboard space that will become available to me and feel a shiver of delight. After all, mothers are humans too!