My empty nest has been condemned

The door is unlocked and slightly ajar. My house looks like it was raided by a SWAT team searching for the stolen jewels from the Louvre heist. Detritus is strewn throughout the entryway, creating a trail worthy of an episode of Hoarders. I step over a half-full Parker’s cup slowly sweating its contents into a puddle on my floor, then trip over a bag of tools, launching its contents across the bathroom like I’ve triggered some sort of suburban booby trap.
The good news is this is not, in fact, a crime scene. The even better news is that my daughter is back from being away all summer.

College has vomited all over my house.

My normally sedate space instantaneously transforms into something typically reserved for midnight on Fraternity Row. At times, I come home to find a child I did not give birth to sitting comfortably on my couch even when my daughter isn’t there. Singing and laughter fill the rooms. Someone finds a long-lost xylophone, and suddenly I’m being treated to a zydeco concert I neither requested nor knew could be performed on a child’s percussion instrument.

Wrappers are everywhere. Cups reproduce overnight. My refrigerator door can no longer close because it is packed with sarcophagi containing the mummified remains of meals past. No one will eat them. No one is allowed to throw them away. Apparently, they are being preserved for science.

My daughter’s friends know they are welcome to anything I have to offer and have now reached the level of comfort where they put their favorite snacks on my grocery list.

I admire the confidence.

The recent Cyclospora contamination of iceberg lettuce has turned my daughter into a carbivore. No. That is not a typo. Apparently, she now subsists entirely on bread and the occasional molecule of oxygen. Despite the fact that South Carolina has no confirmed illnesses linked to this particular outbreak. Despite the fact that I have offered to cook vegetables until they have been stripped of all nutritional value and reduced to a fine, parasite-free mist. She doesn’t really like meat either. So, clearly, cooking dinner is a breeze.

Assuming dinner is a bagel.

And, oh, the emotional roller coaster. Between the “lore-dropping,” “trauma-dumping” and “tea-spilling,” I have been given enough unsolicited backstory to understand the motivations of people I have never actually met.

“Mom, do you want to hear a funny story?”

“Of COURSE I do.”

I’m no longer sure whether I need to call a cleaning service, a therapist or Netflix to see if they’re interested in the rights. God forbid I don’t understand a joke or reference. This triggers an immediate onslaught of TikTok videos presented as supporting evidence, each somehow more disturbing than the last. I rarely understand the joke any better, but I do leave with several new concerns.

I now have a personal relationship with the DoorDash driver, one I never knew I needed and, based on how frequently he appears at my house, may eventually have to include him on the Christmas card.

And while I am grateful for any time my daughter and her friends are willing to share with me, my metabolism did not also come home from college. I cannot survive on DoorDash, leftover pizza and midnight snacks without consequences requiring an intervention.

But I will gratefully endure the barbershop quartet concerts that spontaneously break out in my living room and watch some inexplicably hilarious video of a turtle riding a skateboard. I will listen to the lore, inspect the latest Ulta haul and stay up WAY past my bedtime hearing stories about people I have never met but now know enough about to testify at their trials.

Because I know this time is fleeting.

Before long, the visits will get shorter, the friends will scatter and her life will continue expanding beyond these walls. So, for now, I’ll take the noise, the wrappers, the xylophone and the refrigerator full of archaeological remains.

I will, however, be breaking up with the DoorDash guy.

It’s not me. It’s my metabolism.

Tracy Winslow is still digging through the wreckage in search of most of her cups, half the silverware and a belt her daughter is convinced someone stole but is almost certainly buried in a box. When she isn’t worrying about being found days later beneath a collapsed tower of laundry, she can be found at Low Country Shrimp and Knits or preparing for another semester teaching Spanish to college students. Check out all the knitting, crochet and needle-felting classes and events at shrimpandknits.com