{}NESTING

A week before she left for college, my daughter and I got matching bracelets marketed as “permanent” jewelry. We made appointments at a small, white-washed store in lower Manhattan, where a jeweler measured our wrists, unspooled delicate gold chains, and soldered them onto us. No clasps, just continuous slips of gold. On the sidewalk outside, we twisted our wrists in the sunlight. A shiny ribbon around the gift of our connection.

When my grandmother died, I inherited a box of ribbons. Ribbons she unknotted and plucked from gifts given to her. She would wrap them into tight spirals and tuck them away for reuse. I inherited her habit of saving ribbons; I can’t bring myself to throw them out. Grosgrain, satin, velvet. I curl them around four fingers to make a neat spool and leave them around my office. Coiled on my desk. Pinned to my bulletin board. Tucked like delicate nests between books.

“This doesn’t seem normal,” I tell the girl who washes my hair at the salon, imagining the amount of my hair she must have wrapped around her fingers at this very moment. She just complimented my thick hair. I told her I feel like my hair is thinning, that it’s falling out at an alarming rate.

She smiles and reassures me. “It’s totally normal.” Though her lustrous hair and her shiny, plump lips make me think that her normal and my normal are different.

I google words like perimenopause and hair loss. I read that it is normal to lose up to 100-250 strands of hair with each wash. In the shower, I try to guess what normal looks like, as I untangle hair from my rings, pull it from the folds of my skin, twist it into tidy swirls, and set the pile on the shelf next to the shampoo.

To mark the nearing end of my childbearing years, I am literally forming empty nests out of hair.

Nesting is a figurative term, assigned to pregnant women in their third trimester–not to perimenopausal women in their late forties. It alludes to the urge to prepare for the baby’s arrival. Preparing is a futile effort, but no one should tell an expectant mother that. 

To prepare a nest, birds will use whatever objects they find. Natural materials like snapped twigs, molted feathers, and grass clippings. But also ribbons, string, and human hair.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, we received all sorts of gifts intended to make motherhood easier and babyhood gentler. At my shower, I opened a box of tiny mittens meant to keep the baby from scratching her face with her own fingernails.

One of the first lessons of parenthood: you will worry about things you could have never conceived of. Also, another lesson: mittens get unpaired easily, one is always missing. Object impermanence.

Object impermanence is not a real concept. But it’s one that makes the most sense to me.

The actual name of the concept is object permanence. It is a developmental step–a marker of normal growth. Around ten months, babies realize that even when an object is out of sight it still exists. Before that, if their toy rolls under the couch, say, they think it’s gone. That’s why peek-a-boo makes some kids cry.

My daughter is 21 now. Everytime she leaves, I re-grasp the concept of object permanence.

“Permanent” jewelry is, of course, a marketing ploy for the young. A thin strand of gold can break. Still, I was disappointed when a few months after getting my bracelet soldered on, it fell off. I was swimming laps. My cupped hand cut into the water and I noticed my wrist was bare. I stopped swimming and floated face-down, scanning the pool floor. I found it, a shimmering strand on the black line. At the pool’s edge, next to my water bottle, I curled the chain into a small nest.

What is a nest, anyway, but found objects we wrap around ourselves. A way of holding onto what is beautiful. A perch of identity we spend our lives collecting.

When I got out of the pool, I called my daughter to lament the broken bracelet. But also, to make sure she was okay. To try to stop the tiny fingernails of worry, make sure that the meaning I assigned to a filament of gold was just a figment of a mother’s imagination.

What is an empty nest, anyway, but an offering. A cupped hand, palm up, in prayer.

Jennifer Gallo Gaites is a writer from Fair Haven, NJ where she lives with her husband and three children. She writes mostly about family life and is working on a memoir in essays about the ever-shifting identity of motherhood. Her work has been featured in Hippocampus and Literary Mama. She is a writing instructor at Project Write Now in Red Bank, NJ.