Weddings and Empty Nest

Mothers of the Bride and Groom collaborate on getting those candles lit.

This Saturday, Chris is getting married again. This marriage looks more promising than the first one. But now Eric and I have “The Shoe” all to ourselves. We haven’t been in this situation since 1978.

Just after Chris and Kim signed the papers and became homeowners, Chris began moving his stuff to the new house in Bunker Hill. It was not possible to get everything all in one load, but he did take most of the items in his bedroom. And then, Chris texted me that he was going to be spending the night in Bunker Hill. So, we locked the doors.

As I reached the top of the stairs, I found that his bedroom door was wide open. It usually never is, but now, there was nothing to look at, nothing hidden, and after all, he had just taken out the lamp so now there’s no permanent light in the room.

I turned on the hallway light, walked into the room, and looked around. And I experienced some classic “empty nest syndrome.” I thought I would be okay with him moving out, but found out then that I would definitely miss him – he and his daughter Rori do mean a lot to us after the four years here. So I was a little teary-eyed, but dear family and friends reassured me that we are not alone. I went to bed singing “Counting Every Blessing,” by Rend Collective. And when I woke up, it was still in my head.

We have an air popper, which is the very best way to do popcorn. Watching it rotate for awhile, while the kernels are heating up, you have a brief feeling that they’re never going to pop, that it’s taking too long. Then, one at a time, they begin to explode, revealing their fluffy insides, but still none of them leave the popper. Slowly, the cylinder begins to fill up and one or two leak over the edge and into the waiting bowl. Finally, the speed picks up and the bowl catches them as they make their exodus. And then, there are the final rounds, where all of the remaining little popcorn clouds spin out together, leaving the popper empty – except for a couple of “old maids” who never do leave home.

Eric and I pondered that popper over the years, and remarked to ourselves how that would likely be similar to the end of our at-home kids – the last ones would all just spin out, and leave our home empty like the popper.

The first kernel to leave home was Lisa. She had taken the G.E.D. test at age 17 to prove she had a “real” education, and was promptly offered a scholarship at Ivy Tech (Indiana Vocational Technical College) based on her scores. I didn’t know how she could do so well in math when she piped White Cross into her ears, but she was able to tune out conversations from all the younger siblings and concentrate better. However, Lisa didn’t want a scholarship. And she didn’t want a fancy schmancy graduation ceremony. She just wanted to get married, to a homeschooler we knew from our play of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Erick had become engaged to Lisa the summer before, when she was sixteen, and he was the one who made frequent long-distance calls and tipped us off that my mom’s husband had been trying to sexually accost her while she was in Alaska alone. He also insulated her private bedroom in the attic while she was gone, and seemed like a hard worker in love with our daughter. He had a job at the farm co-op – hard work to be sure, but honest work.

So, we signed the papers as parents, allowing her to marry before her 18th birthday, and she had a really frugal wedding to Erick Luper out in our yard in May of ‘96. We cut down the large mulberry tree in the front so birds growing fat on the berries would not fly overhead and decorate the wedding guests. And we planted flowers all around the yellow barn and the outhouse to make Lisa’s wedding beautiful. Erick’s mom and I were both pregnant at the time, so it was interesting to see the mother-of-the-bride and the mother-of-the-groom waddling around in maternity dresses. Some of our neighbors sat on their porches to watch the proceedings with interest.

That year, after she was gone, I began prematurely to think about empty nests. Yes, I say prematurely because after Lisa was married, I had two more babies, so it was another two dozen years before my youngest baby was married. But I didn’t think of that – I just started becoming obsessed with the Christmas tree. I reasoned that if Lisa took away all her Christmas ornaments that she’d made or been given over the years, and others did the same, then by the time our youngest baby was married, we’d have a naked tree! An unreasonable fear, to be sure. But family and friends saw my need and came to my rescue. I said I had a need for Christmas ornaments that were just mine – something I could keep for myself when my kids all left home. And, I wanted angels.

The angels poured in – beautiful angels of various makes and models, but also some that meant a lot but weren’t angels. One friend and I had had conversations comparing ourselves to pansies, which look fragile at first glance but are actually pretty hardy. Her gift was a picture of pansies, backed with cardboard. 

But there they were – the collection of ornaments that all belonged to Mom. Other “Baby’s First Christmas” ones could go missing as our children grew up, but my collection would still be there. And, mostly because of the love with which they were given, I was comforted.

Emily, at fifteen, was terrified that she would have to marry Erick Luper’s younger brother, as we had remarked that there seemed to be enough Luper's to marry off all the Haley's. But after she understood that that actually wasn’t required, she breathed easier. As the years went by, Emily graduated from high school. Soon there was a young man at church who had a crush on her, but he was rather wild, so we were concerned. We asked Pastor Joe about it and he advised us that certainly we should be praying for the one we thought would be best for Emily. You see, there was another, who actually didn’t go to our church, but he went to the church whose building our church was sharing. He seemed to be a polite, humble man, and when he came to visit her, he offered to do her dishes and fold her clothes. 

When Matt finally got up the nerve to ask Eric for permission to marry Emily, he revealed that his plan for her upkeep included a thriving Cutco business that he would build from the ground up. It wasn’t the most stable plan in the world, but Eric gave him credit for trying, and for being amusing. After Matt graduated from Wabash College, they were married at a new church facility in Lafayette because they had a bigger sanctuary than our church, and their church also allowed dancing. Matt’s family didn’t think a wedding could be possible without the Chicken Dance, and Matt and his college buddies had a tradition of singing “Bye Bye Miss American Pie” together at weddings, arms locked in a circle and swaying back and forth – don’t ask me why.

A second kernel pops! Both of these first two young men promptly stopped going to our church as soon as they married our daughters, so not only didn’t we see them around the house anymore, but we didn’t see them on Sunday mornings either.

Our third kernel was that boy who surprised us at his birth all those years ago, for not being another girl like his sisters. There were several girls, we knew, who went to our church in Delphi because Chris was the worship leader. Some of them were absolutely not good for our son. But Chris really needed a life companion, and one girl stood out as seeming to be a faithful “groupie” of his music and Neon Dove, his band. She somehow always managed to make it to all his concerts. And she was also beautiful and seemed to be truly interested in Jesus.

Chris went to her parents’ house a lot to make friends with her father – who unfortunately really thought she needed a big guy and wasn’t at all impressed with Chris’s size, but was okay with him if Kayla was okay with him. So after mowing their yard pretty often and winning their approval, he bought a ring and worked out a fantastic way to propose on Valentine’s Day at our house, after a really big snow. All his younger siblings were the cooks and waiters at a romantic dinner-for-two in our living room, which they served up in courses, the final course being dessert and the ring.

It took some time for her to say yes, and perhaps we should have been concerned about that, but in the end, when I was the mother-of-the-groom for the first time, I was more concerned that the bride did all the planning for the event and I wasn’t really in on it at all. So I felt rather left out and sad at Chris’s wedding, which took place on a Monday night at the Wabash and Erie Canal Park, at the conference center where we had our church services on Sunday mornings. Eric did get to be the pastor who married them, but I wasn’t really needed for much of anything, and Kayla was already giving me hints that I annoyed her and that she intended to change Chris. 

There was a rocky marriage ahead, but for the time being, another kernel leaked out over the edge of the popper. When he was gone, I missed Chris playing our piano and composing songs on his guitar, but I gave Kayla a cherished picture of mine – a painting of Chris worshipping God with raised arms. It was the coolest belonging I had, that I thought would mean something to her. They continued at our church for a while, until Kayla got mad at me and they started going somewhere else.

Susie was our first student at Calvary Chapel Bible College in Indianapolis (CCBCi). We didn’t really want her driving in a big city so we picked her up and brought her home to Burrows quite a bit. But she did admittedly spend a lot of time wondering if she could get her “M.R.S.” degree there, and in the end, there was another Bible college student who took special interest in her, who would make dinner for her on a weekend when he anticipated her return. 

So we progressed from “nice homeschooler” to “better than the other suitor” to “a member of our church” to now, “a Calvary Chapel Bible College grad”! This was exciting! We were very open to Joe Silva. He was kind, industrious, and capable. We offered him a job as a bookbinder because he seemed to be a creative type, having made duct tape purses as a side business. Joe spent some time living in our barn loft and working for us. And then, they were married at Calvary Chapel Lafayette in June of 2016 by another CCBCi grad, surrounded by roses, since Susie’s middle name is Rose. 

Joe wept when he saw his beautiful bride coming down the aisle. I thought it was kind of neat, but his mom was stage-whispering to him from the front row, to get ahold of himself. 

Eric presenting Joe Silva with the Key to Susie's Heart

Susie and Joe became an integral part of our church in Delphi till it closed down, and have been in Carroll County ever since the wedding, but that wedding was the permanent exit from the popcorn popper.

Robyn had a marvelous idea for the man she wanted to marry. She said it would be a Calvary Chapel pastor’s son. But the first two she met who fit the criteria didn’t work out. The first one seemed to be a little crazy, starting with getting dreadlocks in his blond hair, and then getting totally shorn to get rid of them when he was tired of them. Then, after telling her a story about a guy who was caught under a crashed airplane, who cut off his arm to escape certain death, he told her he had to break off the relationship.

The second pastor’s son told her how beautiful she was and that he loved her. So she invited him to her 4-H fashion revue, whereupon he rather pointedly backed out of the fashion show and the relationship. He was really only interested in hunting and fishing, which really wasn’t Robyn’s forte. 

That’s when Robyn started looking beyond CC pastors’ sons and found Sam Carr, a homeschooler who also loved drama like she did. We were not in favor for a while, because Sam wasn’t convincing in the role of a suitor for an evangelical pastor’s daughter, being himself a devout Calvinist. 

Robyn went to Israel as a volunteer, and I hoped she would find one of Ayelet’s cousins to be the perfect mate, but while she was gone, Sam wrote her long letters and was waiting for her when she returned. This is a really long story, with a lot of twists and turns, but eventually we felt like affliction had improved Sam enough, and he was given permission to ask Robyn to marry him. He immediately hurried over to her and asked her, she said yes, and they planned their wedding for three months later. 

The couple paid for most of the expenses themselves because the wedding would be so soon, and they were married at the Reformed Presbyterian Church in Lafayette. They couldn’t help a little theatrics, though. At the end of the ceremony, Sam picked up Robyn and rushed down the aisle and out the back of the church with her, surprising even the pastor, who had opined at the rehearsal that they would need longer recessional music.

It was much quieter in the Haley Household when Robyn was married, and that was actually a good thing.

The next kernel was David, who left suddenly for Bible college after he graduated from high school. That hasty decision resulted in David meeting and falling in love with someone at the grocery store near the Bible college. It took awhile to convince her dad, but it wasn’t because her dad didn’t like David. He just thought Brooke needed some more maturity before she ran off and got married. He actually liked David a lot, but the clincher was when David joined the Air Force, so that his daughter would be well cared for. Brooke’s dad is a retired Army officer. But David had to get through Basic Training before he could ask her to marry him. He did that right after the ceremony because Brooke and her friend had driven through the night all the way from Indiana to San Antonio to be there and support him.

For the next year, they only spoke through FaceTime, even getting their pre-marital counseling virtually. Then in June, David and Brooke were married in a blue and yellow ceremony outdoors at the amphitheater of the Bible college by Bill Goodrich, the pastor of the Indianapolis church. David wore his Air Force blues, and his nephew Jay, as best man, also wore his.

When David and Brooke were planning their wedding, Brooke was very sensitive to my feelings, making sure I was in on the planning all the way. But then when I had a dance with my military son, this veteran’s heart swelled with pride. I heard countless cameras clicking and flashing when I danced with him, but my eyes were closed tightly, and I held him close. It was the last time I could do that.

Dancing with David

By the time of David’s wedding Chris and Kayla’s marriage was a thing of the past, so their daughter Rori was able to come freely and participate. And my dad came up from Southern Indiana with Angela. Dad was really interested in the zip lines at the Bible college. David’s wedding didn’t make me sad because by then we had Chris back home, and David had been gone already for a while.

But the next two weddings came fast and furious – two kernels trying to be done at the same moment. Both Valerie and Vivian got engaged the same weekend, and then, they had to figure out who would get married when, so that we didn’t overtax ourselves having weddings too close together. Eric and I thought they should just have a double wedding, but they were different enough that their weddings had to be unique. Still, some people at Calvary Chapel Lafayette, where both weddings were held, were challenged by our daughters’ “V” names and kept mixing them up.

With enough careful planning, we were able to budget enough for a January wedding (between semesters at Valerie’s college (St. Mary of the Woods), where she was studying music therapy, and a June wedding for Vivi, after her first year of Bible college at CCBCi. 

Valerie’s fiance’, Joe Stewart V, was a homeschooler and had been a medic in the US Army. We found that his family was warm and fun, played cards a lot, … and went to another Calvinist church. We were beginning to realize that not only were our kernels being shot from the “home popper,” they were being shot clear out of our “church popper” as well. Even Joe and Susie, the CCBCi grads who remained close to home, were now attending Harvest Chapel in Lafayette (pastored by Jeremy Camp’s dad). And now we were expecting another wedding to a Calvinist. The best we could hope was that we might get to see them from time to time at our church, and that Valerie would be true to what she’d been taught as a child. But our church family was sad that Valerie, who had so much musical talent that she got a prestigious scholarship at her college, would be leaving us for another church.

As for the wedding itself, Valerie’s planning sessions resulted in a winter themed wedding, where strangely, it was actually warm enough in Indiana that I wore sandals. Her wedding invitations were of the “Winter Wonderland” type, which were fairly popular because of Frozen, and they offered mostly cake and hot chocolate to their guests, with some nuts and mints, reminiscent of my own wedding in California. Valerie and Joe seriously wanted to get to their next destination as soon as humanly possible, so they didn’t have a lot of formalities to keep that from happening. 

The most memorable circumstances about this January wedding: Joe’s mom had just had foot surgery and arrived in a wheelchair, but she was determined that she would dance with her son, as mother of the groom, and she did. David was deployed to Iraq so he couldn’t come, but Brooke bravely tried to make the three-day trip from New Mexico with a friend, getting stopped by an ice storm and car breakdowns. Emily and Matt did not even try to make it from Iowa! And our friend Perry the police officer was awake for almost 24 hours straight, making the wedding cake.

Rori was always especially excited to see Vivi home for the weekend to do wedding planning with her mom, and she grew close to her youngest aunt, but as the popcorn kernels spun away, Rori found herself alone in the big room, grieving the loss. At turns, she would love or hate Joe Stewart and Andrew Streeter because they were either fun or stealing away her aunts. I had armed myself with Nerf pistols and had fun with the grandkids by shooting them. (And I’m a good shot!) And I loved having shootouts with Andrew because their family were all hunters and we were pretty evenly matched.

So in June, with several of Andrew’s brothers in the wedding party, I made it my mission to arm all of the groomsmen. Officer Perry joined in the fun with a weapon with “LPD” on the side, and besides the normal flower petals, Andrew and Vivian were pelted with Nerf darts (mostly Andrew). Lest you think that cruel, you should know that they gifted each other with Nerf guns for at-home use as well, as they settled down in married student accommodations for Vivian’s second year of Bible college.

But oh yeah, the wedding itself! It was well-attended and might have been a super-spreader event, had it happened a few years later. Vivi had to wait longer for her wedding, but it was when everybody could actually make it, including all their Bible college friends, church friends, and all of our family. Even David was back from Iraq. They had a DJ at the reception, and all their friends and nieces and nephews danced all the modern wedding hits, and our family choir sang “The Hallelujah Chorus” together.

The Haley Family Choir, singing The Hallelujah Chorus

Andrew had a lot of input in this one because he wanted things to be a certain way, including the food and the invitations. Certain items were from Chick-Fil-A, that Sam delivered since he was a manager there by that time, and other items on Andrew’s list were gathered up from various places. We had some beautiful fruit trays from Meijer’s produce department, made to Andrew’s specs – no watermelon or cantaloupe!

Andrew’s least favorite part of the wedding was the bells at the reception. I didn’t know anybody could be so strongly against those little “Kiss her! Kiss her!” bells, especially after Robyn and Sam’s wedding! But their wedding was a truly marvelous affair.

Valerie made the wedding cake this time, with live flowers as decor, and Vivian and her bridesmaids made their own bouquets the night before. She showed them how. Afterwards, we found that someone had hung all the bouquets upside-down, to dry them. They ended up somehow coming home with us. We found them on top of a cabinet in Rori’s room yesterday, and finally decided to throw them all away. We still have to clean up all the crumbled organic matter on the floor before Brooke and David get here on Thursday, and move in Chris’s bed for them.

But all this talk of kernels of popcorn accomplished two things: One, I got hungry writing this and had to make popcorn. And two, it reminded me of our Five Kernels of Corn ceremony on Thanksgiving, where each of the participants thinks of one blessing for each kernel and tells it to the rest of the family. In this case, we had eight kids, and each one of their kernels stands for a huge blessing from God.

When we started doing rearranging jobs, the “empty nest” I had felt was a lot better. We were doing something positive and reclaiming the space. We found we had a lifetime supply of crayons for at least five children, for one thing. There may be more that I haven't found yet.

There are many more jobs yet to be done, but doing them a little at a time will be pleasant. And then, we'll have a comfortable "Haley Hotel," where visitors from afar like David and Brooke can spend the night. We’re looking forward to having Kimberly as a new daughter! And in case you’re wondering, yes, there is an applicable Scripture passage for this time in our lives:

“Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, The fruit of the womb is a reward.

Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, So are the children of one's youth.

Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them; They shall not be ashamed, But shall speak

with their enemies in the gate.”  

     ~Psalm 127:3-5

 What do you do with arrows? Why, you shoot them, of course!