Review by Jane Ward
On the first day of first grade, my daughter and I walked into a room decorated by her new teacher with the usual lively trimmings: a colorful reading area rug, labeled cubbies for puzzles and books and art supplies, and number and alphabet letter banners running along all four walls. She also had hung from the ceiling a sign so big it couldn’t be missed. The sign read, Change Is Constant And Necessary–a message that guaranteed that each school day that year would be different and at times challenging, and in its way provided a gentle reminder that life going forward would hold similar changes for all of them, constant and necessary. For many, especially those craving stability, this is a difficult lesson to learn, let alone embrace.
I was reminded of this message recently when reading Morgan Baker’s soul-bearingly honest debut memoir, Emptying the Nest: Getting Better at Goodbyes, in which Morgan hones in on the challenges of self-rediscovery once a major role–in Morgan’s case, her role as mother–is no longer the life-defining force it once was. Who are we mothers when our children fly the nest? Why do we wish our children independent flight but also wish we could keep them with us forever? Why is the transition from full-time nurturer to full-time person in our own right so darn hard at times? Why do things have to change when we’re comfortable as we are?
Morgan struggles to manage all these emotions when her oldest daughter, Maggie, prepares to leave home for college. In raw and unsentimental prose, she contemplates why this rite of passage seems particularly hard, and considers that it may stem from her childhood and the sudden, unexplained divorce of her parents.
At nine years old, I experienced the end of our family as I knew it….One day after Christmas when I was in fourth grade, my mother and father had sat my seven-year-old brother and me down at the round dining room table, and Daddy said, “Your mother is going to move with you and your baby sister to London. You will go to school there, and I will come visit.” (p. 3)
Complicating Morgan’s deep-seated feelings about the impending change to her immediate family is her fear of the life-threatening food allergy that Maggie will now have to manage on her own. As anticipatory dread begins to settle over her, threatening to revive the crippling depression she has lived with off and on throughout her life, she and her husband turn to their family pets, a pair of Portuguese water dogs, one older, one an adolescent. What if, husband Matt suggests, we fill this last year as a family of four under one roof with breeding young Spray and raising a litter of puppies? After some resistance, Morgan throws herself into the project. Not long after, the family finds themselves nurturing a litter of ten puppies.
For a time, the project is a distraction for Morgan. Care of the pups requires her to be in the moment. Her work as a teacher at Emerson College requires the same, and she finds some solace in showing up for the routines. But Baker’s is not a simple story offering a simplistic solution to the question of how to occupy oneself in the face of great change. As she has suspected might happen, Maggie’s departure triggers in Morgan both a deep depression and a cascade of crushing insecurities that will not be staved off.
Once depression seeped into my bones, veins, and arteries, it was a constant companion. Some times were easier than others, but it lurked, waiting, ready to pounce like our puppies–but this springing wasn’t fun and playful. This feeling hurt and lingered. (p. 166)
As the depression recedes, as puppies find their way to new homes and both children leave the nest and older dogs reach the end of their lives, Morgan emerges transformed by each event–affected, often redirected, but not broken–acknowledging a truce of sorts that she’s made with her fear of change. “My life as a mother,” she writes, “has been about learning the balance between holding on and letting go….I am learning that I am more than a mother. I am a quilter, writer, teacher, wife, and lover of dogs.” (p. 216-17) Morgan Baker’s journey is one a reader will easily fall into and move through with her, like best friends bucking each other up at each bump. It is poignant and relatable, both uniquely hers and universal–the perfect combination for a successful memoir that offers us a glimpse into another’s life so that we may understand our own.
Emptying the Nest: Getting Better at Goodbyes by Morgan Baker
Ten16 Press, May 2023
Paperback $16.99
ISBN PB 978-1-64538-481-6
Jane Alessandrini Ward is the author of In the Aftermath (She Writes Press, 2021), The Mosaic Artist (2011) and Hunger (Forge, 2001). She has been a contributing writer for an online regional and seasonal food magazine and a blogger and occasional host of cooking videos for an internet recipe resource. Jane lives in Massachusetts. To learn more, visit janeaward.com.