Nesting
By Melissa Kutsche
@melissakutschewrites
“Mom, look! A nest!” my son yells from the yard. I look up from the lunch dishes soaking in the sink and peer out the window.
“Cool, Buddy,” I call back through the screen. He’s gazing up at the tallest tree in our backyard, a gangly, long-limbed specimen with bright green leaves. I follow his stare to a low-hanging branch, and I see it too––a female bird flitting about with a stick in her beak, trying to find it the perfect place. My son takes a break from watching nest construction to ride his scooter around the patio, but I watch the mother bird while I stack clean plates in the drying rack. She literally is nesting, I think to myself, smiling with recognition.
When I was 39 weeks pregnant with my firstborn, a compulsion to clean pushed me to my hands and knees, where I scrubbed the track of the sliding door with cotton swabs and magic erasers. During my second pregnancy, my husband and I painted a sky blue accent wall in the baby’s nursery. We enlisted our 2-year-old to help, hoping it would help her feel she had an important role in welcoming her baby brother to our family. With aching legs, I oversaw the building of a new bookshelf for my third baby, sorted through hand-me-downs, and decided which baby gear to upgrade. The cleaning, the painting, the sorting—it was all necessary, yet also a distraction from the unknowns of labor and delivery and upcoming changes to our family dynamics.
Over the next few days, the mama bird in the backyard captivates our family. One morning, the kids search for nest-building materials and lay them out on a small bench below the nest-in-progress. Later, they run to the back door, their sweaty faces beaming. “Mom! We put out sticks and leaves for the nest, and she took them!” they squeal. My husband uses his bird field guide to identify the bird for us, determining that she, with her drab, grayish body feathers and yellow head, is a verdin. Mama Verdin has woven the kids’ offerings into a nest unlike any I’ve ever seen; rather than bowl-shaped, it’s spherical with a tiny opening toward the bottom. After dinner one night, we inspect the cantaloupe-sized dwelling, and it appears to be complete. She’s done it, I think. She’s ready.
***
We found out two months ago that my husband would be deploying, and while he completed paperwork, attended training sessions, and packed, I attempted to get us organized at home. I made a list of jobs for us to complete before his departure and another list of projects for me to tackle while he is gone. We updated legal documents, stocked up on medication for the dog, and got both cars detailed with oil changes. We put a hold on his phone line and let the car insurance company know that his car would be in storage for awhile. Each task provided a welcome diversion from the reality of our impending separation. Pouring my energy into preparations gave me a sense of control over a situation that was completely out of my hands.
One night just before his departure, my husband and I sat together on the living room couch eating chocolate ice cream. We had just discussed our plans to say goodbye at the airport, and the house was quiet except for the whir of the baby monitor and the clanging of spoons against bowls. “I’m surprised by how at peace I feel about this,” I said, scraping drippy chocolate from the bottom of my bowl. “I mean, I don’t want you to leave, but I feel ready.”
“I know what you mean,” he responded. “I’m glad you feel ready.”
“I do wonder… if we are forgetting something important, something that would be obvious if we’d done this before… but I feel like I don’t know what I don’t know. So I guess, other than that, I feel prepared,” I said. I was surprised when emotion sneaked in and clenched my throat. “It will be hard, but I know we’ll get through it.”
***
Cumulonimbus clouds linger in the sky to the south, a rarity here in the sun-soaked desert. The wind gusts above 40 miles per hour, and the trees in our backyard flail. I watch the nest with concern as it bounces up and down, as though the branch is an arm trying to shake a bug off of itself.
“Why the heck would she build the nest there?” I ask out loud to no one in particular. Only now, on the cusp of a storm, do I question the adequacy of the verdin’s handiwork. “Isn’t she supposed to have instincts that tell her good places to build?” The nest is still bobbing, and I’m sure we will find it in the rocks later as nothing but a heap of sticks. Her work will all be for nothing. How did she not see this coming?
One week prior, I watched my kids hug their daddy and say goodbye to him for six months. When he lifted up my daughter, she wrapped her skinny, 7-year-old legs around his waist and refused to let him go. My 5-year-old son nestled into my side and the baby gnawed on the straps of the baby carrier, blissfully oblivious to the goodbyes going on in front of him.
My husband usually puts the big kids to bed while I nurse the baby, and the first bedtime routine after his departure was difficult for all of us. “Mommy,” my daughter started, looking at me with red eyes and a trembling lip. “I wish that I could cry all of my tears out so there wouldn’t be any more left to cry later.” She pushed her face into the doll-sized pillow with her daddy’s picture printed on it, smiling back at her in his uniform.
“Oh, Honey,” I whispered, brushing the hair out of her face and tracing her jawline with my fingertips. “I am so sorry you are hurting, but I understand why you are sad.” She asked me to sing Leaving on a Jet Plane, and I somehow got through it without my voice cracking. Afterward, in the baby’s room, I let my own tears fall while he suckled. When he finished, I laid him in his crib and padded to the doorway in the dark. I pulled the door closed without a sound and thought, Day one, check. You can do this. I hope I’m right.
***
Some of the advice I received from friends whose spouses have deployed was to keep the deployment a secret from the kids until just before he was going to leave. There’s a thought that it would be worse to tell them right away, that the early news might cause the kids to despair in anticipation rather than enjoy those days as normal days together. Instead of concealing the truth, we opted to tell our kids about the deployment as soon as it was official. We knew it would be hard on them, and we wanted to give space for their questions and time for them to process before Daddy left.
Each of the big kids had a “Daddy Date” in the weeks leading up to his departure. They chose an activity to do with their dad, just the two of them. One kid chose a hike and frozen yogurt. The other selected shopping for and building a new desk. We got the big kids pillowcases with Daddy’s face printed on them so they can snuggle him each night. They wrote notes and drew pictures to stuff into his suitcase the night before he left. We did our best, but now that he’s actually gone, I realize there’s nothing we could have done to prepare them for the strange grief they now carry.
By evening, the winds have died down. I step out onto the patio, and I see the nest right where it should be, holding fast, cleaving to the branch. I feel a little sorry for underestimating Mama Verdin. Was she nervous watching the winds whip her creation around? Or did she trust her own instincts? Perhaps she knew all along that she had done her best and built something delicate, yet strong.
***
We are on the second of 180 days of this deployment. Things don’t feel much different yet, but a lot can happen in six months, and anxiety is not a new companion for me. I worry about burnout from solo parenting three kids without childcare. I worry about navigating broken bones and broken appliances alone. I’m exhausted considering the hundreds of catastrophes that could occur and feeling I need to be ready to face them if they do.
Although I have known deployment was a possibility, it’s not what I would have chosen for us. I am proud of my husband, and I also wish he was home. I understand this is his duty, and I also wish he could sing songs to the kids at bedtime. Knowing it could happen and living it are very different. Now we are living it.
I read that the large, spherical nests of verdins are often built on low branches with an opening down on one side, which fits exactly with the nest in our yard. I also read something that surprised me: verdins build their nests so the entrances face prevailing winds. It is thought that this provides better cooling of the interior of the nest. The very winds that threaten the nest are to be faced, even welcomed, head on.
I imagine the mother bird will be laying eggs soon. The nest she built will provide a safe place for her eggs until they hatch, and then it will be a place for the hatchlings to grow and learn. Those baby birds will be long gone by the time my husband comes home, but I have a feeling he will see the nest again. The winds will return and the branches will dance, but mama will not be shaken. She can trust that she has built something sturdy and deliberate, something that will survive, and a place where her family will thrive, even through the fiercest winds.