Hansen's Rule of Adult Children: Wherever they are, you want them somewhere else. If they're away, you want them home, but after they've been home a while, you start missing your cherished routines. The Charming and Delightful and I relished raising our daughters and our two imported chillrens. But when they all went off to college, I settled very nicely into empty nesting. In fact, I settled into it so well that it's difficult for me to interrupt it.
Living under Hansen's Rule of Adult Children creates cognitive dissonance. When informed of a visit from the kids, excitement and anticipation grow. Cleaning takes on renewed vigor to put spit and polish into all nooks and crannies. Grass is cut, weeds are pulled, leaves are raked. Stores are visited to lay in all the necessary supplies to properly and thoroughly spoil said visitors. Happiness and joy abound when the car comes down the drive!
And yet within days of the arrival, thoughts turn to missed routines. I get increasingly cranky with every short night, no matter how delightful the previous evening's conversation. In quiet moments alone in the garage, I find myself accelerating the countdown to departure. But when it's finally time to go, before the car gets to the top of the driveway I'm awash in sadness, missing my babies, all thoughts of discomfort banished. If only they could stay a little longer... Unless of course they actually turn around, when my initial reaction would be what now? Will I ever get the TV remote back?
Hansen's Rule of Adult Children was not in effect when my oldest daughter and my grandson came to live with us during her husband's deployment to Afghanistan. That's because no interruption, inconvenience or lost sleep wasn't trumped by living every day with my little guy and his mom. It really didn't matter how bad my day was when he would reach for my glasses and say 'fight, Pa', signaling his desire for a wrestling match. The Charming and Delightful still smiles at the memory of pulling into the garage and seeing a naked boy waving from the door. Every time I went outside, there was my little buddy right behind, ready to help. And every day was another chance to see what an accomplished, able, loving wife and mom my daughter had grown into.
Nor has Hansen's Rule usually applied to the Youngest Daughter, in whom I may have instilled a little too much independence. Her visits home have been too infrequent and too short in duration to allow for the full displacement to take effect. I'm just too tickled to see her to worry about being displaced from my routine.
Come to think of it, the Rule doesn't work that well with my imported kids, either. (Imported is shorthand for our two exchange students...) The last time Hanna-Girl was back in the US, she was here for more than three weeks. Rather than help her pack, I distinctly recall telling her that there was a perfectly wonderful university right across the river in Peoria that she could attend. Besides being our alma mater, I argued, it has the distinct advantage of allowing her to live with us. She chose Vienna and Hamburg, of all places to attend university, instead of Peoria. Nevertheless, I'm on record that she's welcome to visit whenever she likes, for as long as she likes. And the same goes for Morten, our Danish son, despite my overwhelming desires to alternately hug him or bonk him on the head. He's turning into quite the young man.
Honestly, Hansen's Rule of Adult Children probably isn't a rule at all. For all the moaning and complaining I do about having my world turned upside down whenever the kids come to visit, I don't really ever want them to leave. But they must, because life goes on, and didn't I raise them to live their own lives?
I reckon Hansen's Rule of Adult Children is just another way of saying you're getting too set in your ways, old man.
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