HEART & SOUL: About heartstrings and hearth things

By Jennifer Hansen

Posted: April 13, 2011 at 4:27 a.m.

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LITTLE ROCK — We spend years accumulating only to reach the top of that hill, switch gears and start paring down. What was it all for?

It was for security, memories, enjoyment and the pleasure of collecting, decorating or completing a home. It’s how we humans feather our nest, and if we could step outside moral judgments about materialism for a moment, it’s also how we create the place we and our family recognize as home.

Home means different things to different people. For my daughter at this point in her journey, home is wherever her books and her mom are. (Note to self: Make sure I always have plenty of bookshelves.) For my son, his room is still his world and our home is hearth and stability. For me, it’s where I truly relax.

But somewhere down the road, there’s room for rethinking my space. More and more, I’m hearing other parents talk about doing just that. And unlike previous generations it has little or nothing to do with retirement, which for most of us is still a long way off.

Right now, my job is simply to be there. To, as my sister says, “maintain secure ground until they don’t need it anymore.” Of course, when approximately 60 percent of young adults move home for some length of time after college, keeping a place for them isn’t something we can put a time limit on. But after our kids have been out on their own, there are other options than the home they know filled with stuff they recall.

At various points in our journey, memories and memorabilia matter a great deal. They help us establish and illustrate the family history, values and legacy we bestow on our children. They imbue our place with our story, making it so redolent with us and ours that it’s the only place our family calls “home.”

For now, I keep the hearth for my children as much as for me. What was once so important to me matters less now, but it still matters greatly to them and I’m willing to hold this course for a while longer, but probably not forever. As my oldest becomes truly independent and my youngest moves toward his final year in high school, I can see that a change may be coming for me, too.

Years ago, I saw my grandparents reach the point at which the big house became a big encumbrance. They’d worked hard, accumulated much, and then slowly and deliberately they let it all go. In the end, the stuff mattered little. So they kept the memories and got rid of stuff. Much of that stuff came to my cousins, my sister, and me. And we were thrilled with it. We’ve cherished it and added to it, and one of these days, we’ll repeat the process.

But our timeline is different. We have the luxury of expecting longer lives than they expected. Since our window of time is wider than theirs, downsizing forced by physical limitations is further out in the future. Even so, more adults are rethinking their space and it doesn’t look anything like retirement.

In fact, sometimes it looks like the opposite of retirement. We’re working harder or differently, not only because of the economy but also because we have spare time we didn’t have when we had kids at home. Options like changing careers, going back to school, traveling, are all part of the next phase of life, a phase previous generations often never had the chance to enjoy.

As we get older and change physically, our lives will reflect our needs. But for many of us, long before age requires it, the years of creating a nest for the whole family are ending. For more and more of us, it’s time to rethink - and sometimes resize - the nest itself.

Write to Jennifer Hansen at Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, P.O. Box 7, Springdale, Ark. 72765. Email her at:

jhansen@arkansasonline.com

Family, Pages 31 on 04/13/2011

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