Cutting the apron strings and flying the nest

Aaargh! Someone said it. A man.

It makes my blood boil.

‘Time to cut the apron strings’ - because that isn’t a 1950s housewife stereotype if ever there is one! It is so sexist, so gendered, so diminishing.

As if what I am feeling is because I am in some way clinging, holding on to, preventing, suffocating my son. It speaks of a simplistic binary understanding of this process of separation.

Then there is the ‘empty nest’ as if there is nothing else in the nest! As if I don’t work, don’t have a social life, an inner life, a life of meaning and purpose.

Language matters so let’s call this what it is - grief.

I feel grief at my son leaving home and I can feel that at the same time as feeling excited for him, concerned about him, supporting of him in every way; emotionally, practically, financially.

I can even simultaneously feel curious, and even sometimes excited about what this new phase holds for me.

The language around this phase, of aprons and nests is minimising. You can tell someone they need to cut the apron strings but would never dream of saying to someone who was bereaved that they should ‘cut the strings’ to whoever they have lost.

But then this is a cultural pathology. In the most recent edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual (that is used to diagnose mental health issues) a new disorder was added; ‘Prolonged grief disorder’. You can read the detail about it in the link, but basically if you are still feeling bad about a bereavement a year on, then you are now classed as having a ‘disorder’.

This, in a culture which allows us so little time off work when we are bereaved. When my own mum died too young, I was allowed a week of work and then was advised to sign myself off sick if I wanted any more time off. But I wasn’t sick, I was sad, and there was a whole lot of stuff to do (funerals, death certificates etc).

Grief is not specific to death. It is to do with the loss of something or someone who is meaningful to us. And this is a loss. I’ve spent 18 years with him pretty much every day and then he will be gone. I never went back home to live and I doubt that he will.

To not name it grief is to not give it the gravitas and respect it deserves.

To acknowledge grief, acknowledges relationship and care. Let us not undermine that with thoughtless talk of nests and strings.