Nest Launch

It’s the heart of summer and there is a nest of baby robins high in the Engelmann spruce tree in my yard. As usual, my husband, with his hunter’s eyes, is the first to spot it from our deck.  

“If you keep watching,” he says, “you’ll see the mother come back to feed them. The babies stretch their beaks out of the nest, as wide open as possible. You can hear their tiny chirps.”

I look at the tree for many, many minutes and fail to find the nest. 

“Stand right here,” he coaches. “Do you see the nest? The horizontal line, right there. OK. Don’t move. When the mother comes back, look at the open sky and you’ll see the babies come out.”

That level of instruction is what it takes for me to I finally see the nest and its baby birds, summoning all of their strength to reach for the incoming food. I begin watching the nest daily with more attention. I notice that the parent robin, who always seems to carry something in its beak, never flies directly to the nest. The bird zig zags cautiously from branch to branch and then goes to the nest, where the babies wait with wide open beaks. The chicks grow so fast, and I find myself worrying about the raising of robins. How do they leave this nest so high up in the air? What if these robins are new parents who have never had chicks before–do they know what they are doing? Is the raising of chicks the same for each one, or do the adults give each baby different parenting?

As the mother of a 17-year-old who just moved out a month ago to start college, worry wondering has deep resonance for me. So much can go wrong when kids move out on their own. Teenagers are hard-wired to make at least a few bad decisions, sometimes with life-changing consequences. And of course there are the wolves of the world who prey on the young and naive, especially if they are female and attractive. I have been trying for years, just like the mother robin–to make sure she was ready for her first flight. She wasn’t, and this is something the mother robin and I share this year as that same 17 year old calls up to me, “Mom there is a baby bird in the yard. I almost stepped on it. What should I do?”

My daughter is back living at home because, during her first month in her new apartment, she hadn’t been getting a job or working on her two summer school classes but instead had been going out drinking with friends. A lot. A few weeks before the baby bird incident, she woke up after a night of drinking herself to black out, not remembering how she got there or what had happened. She didn’t call either parent, but instead texted her uncle, who then let us know. We decided she needed to come and stay at home for a while. Sort of an informal rehab.

In the first few days she was home, it was like seeing a ghost of someone she had never been. Always well dressed, I now saw her day after day wearing the same stretchy pants and stained T-shirt. Glasses dirty, hair unwashed, her whole body had contracted. She looked small and fragile to me, like the slightest impact could break her apart. Shame had replaced her confidence, and I broke to see her deflated of the spirit that had always lifted her up.

With the thought of the helpless chick on the ground filling my mind, I rush downstairs and see the baby bird sitting squat in the middle of our bike path beneath the spruce tree. Sparsely feathered with bare spots, the baby bird is alive, but it is breathing heavily. I don’t know what to do, so I grab my laptop and find an article about just this situation. It says if you find a baby bird out of the nest, first determine if it is a nestling or a fledgling. If it is a fledgling, you can just leave it alone. They can’t fly the first few days out of the nest, but they aren’t going back to the nest, either. They can hop around and will usually stay close to their parents mooching food as they prepare to fly. Kind of like college students. 

If you find a nestling, though, it is not ready to be on its own. Nestlings cannot hop or flit about, and they aren’t fully feathered. You are supposed to try to return them to the nest so the parent robins will keep feeding it (a relentless job, it turns out, because baby birds eat about every 20 minutes). 

Our robins have built their nest at a safe and unreachable distance, more than 40 feet up in the Engelmann. There is no chance of returning the baby. Hanging from a much lower branch in the same tree, though, is a bird feeder box that I can reach with a step ladder. I walk up to the baby. It is not hopping or flitting in any way. Its eyes are softly closed, perhaps replaying the trauma that landed it here on our bike path of doom, but almost certainly wishing itself back in its nest. Did it try to fly too soon? Was it pushed out by an aggressive nestmate? Was it an accident of wind and fate? Does it matter now?

The feeder box seems like the best option, so I gather some dried grass to soften the wooden floor for a makeshift nest, wondering while building it what the robin’s parents will think of my efforts. I pick up the baby bird, who is still breathing but not trying to hop or flap its wings, and place it in the box. I haven’t seen or heard the adult birds at all. 

I settle into a chair nearby and watch the baby in the box, hoping to see a robin return. With time just sitting and watching, I can’t help but think about my daughter’s failed attempt to leave our nest, trying to see it clearly through a haze of emotion. Is this a rite of passage, and she is just a normal fledgling, hopping around a bit before she takes off? Or is she really a nestling who isn’t fully feathered and will not thrive, or maybe even survive, away from the nest? On the outside she looks just like an adult, but what does that mean? Can she learn to fly by sheer will alone?

Leaving a year early for college was her decision, and she worked hard for it by taking summer school and working steadily since she was 15. The kid who always wanted to be older, she was ahead in credits and had a lot of money saved. High school was not a great experience for her—maybe it isn’t for many kids—but she didn’t want to ride it out. She wanted to ride on. I am not not a mother-knows-best kind of parent, so her father and I have let her take the lead in making her own decisions. Moving on to the next chapter early and getting a year of college paid for by her high school was something we could support. Sitting here watching the baby bird, though, I am now questioning that approach. I think about Ronan Farrow who went to college at age 11. “He did alright,” I say to comfort myself.

But parenting is such a long game. From the time babies start walking, you try to balance stepping up and standing back, letting them make their own decisions and mistakes while supporting them and keeping them safe. All along you are hoping that, by the time they hit the milestone birthdays, they have the skills and knowledge they need. But how can we tell if they do?

The article about saving the baby robin says it needs to eat at least once an hour. I see the female robin return to the ground where the baby was with a delicious worm in its beak. It takes off again. My heart breaks. Have I have done the wrong thing and doomed the baby? What if the adult robins don’t find the baby in its new nest? 

It has been an hour. 

In addition to earthworms and mealworms, the article says you can feed the baby bird canned cat food, of all things, dipped in water from the end of a chopstick. Since we have this on hand, I will try it first. I go to the new nest box and the baby is still alive, but very weak.I gently approach with the chopstick, unsure if it is sound or smell or touch that prompts it to open its beak. At the lightest touch, the bird’s beak opens impossibly wide, and it seems to eagerly eat the cat food. 

I am relieved and hopeful. I set an alarm for every 20 minutes to feed it. 

I wish that I had earthworms.

Back in my chair, I sink into our own trauma. My husband and I weren’t sure how to respond to the binge drinking episode. Like nearly all families I know, we have alcoholics on each side of our bloodlines. With just a few weeks left before college starts, we have to decide if she can go back. If she returns to her apartment and college in the fall, there will be no parents there to watch out for her or rein her in or pick her up. If she stays home, she will lose two semesters of college and the cost of her apartment, but maybe the biggest loss of all would be the faith in her that she can do this. We needed to talk about her drinking, but this was a new kind of conversation for all of us. Though she was scared and hurt, she was willing, and I saw that as a hopeful sign. 

When I thought about the talk, my urge was to start by bringing the hammer DOWN, by raining anger on her until she was scared straight, because that is what my parents would have done. My husband gently corrected that course.

“She is basically on her own now, ” he wisely offered. “Don’t we need to see where her head is? If she isn’t ready, she can stay home and put things off. Start college later when she is ready.”

He sounded so reasonable, so calm and nonchalant, like he was checking the weather to see if we should go camping or stay home. I did not feel calm. I felt scared and angry and confused. My daughter and I had always been close, so learning about her secret life felt like a betrayal. But this wasn’t personal, and it definitely wasn’t about me. It was about her, scared and vulnerable, her nerves raw and exposed, feeling everything with nothing to numb the pain. 

We started talking about her drinking, and she was so beautifully honest. It gave her some relief, she said, a way to just forget about all of her anxiety and let her be one of the group. Most of her friends are older, and drinking is their social activity. She said she had been noticing lately that she was having trouble stopping once she started and was a little worried herself about having a drinking problem. She was scared that she might be in trouble. 

With a jolting trill that pulls me out of my mind and puts me back under the spruce tree, the timer on my phone goes off, and I try the cat-food-on-a-chopstick again. The bird opens its beak, but this time it won’t take the food no matter how many times I try. I go in search of earthworms. 

I find earthworms at the second gas station, and they seem pretty large to me, more attractive to the trout I suppose. I chop off a small piece of the wriggler and impale it on a toothpick. I dip it in water and head to the nest box. The baby bird seems weaker, but it may just be my fear reading into what I see. I touch the side of its butter yellow beak with my worm piece, and it opens for me. I gently slip the worm down into the scarlet cave of its tiny mouth, and it closes its beak around the bite. I feel happy and hopeful as I resume my watch from my chair until I realize that I have not seen any adult robins near the nest box in two hours. Have they given up?

In the time that my daughter has been home, we have created a kind of rehab for her that limits her freedom, so she has been home a lot. We have been talking more in recent weeks than we had in many months. She told me about one friend in her circle, a girl in her early 20s, who doesn’t drink because she had a problem. She wanted to call her and talk about what she is going through. I told her those are some of the best people to talk to, ones who have been where she is. WE haven’t talked about the future yet, more taking things one day at a time. We have been playing family games at night or watching movies together. It has been at once like turning back time and acting out a play. 

Almost imperceptibly, an old normal started to reappear at home. My daughter began to work on the summer school classes she had been failing. I saw her in cute outfits with clean clothes. She started complaining about her sister and showing signs of her previous self, the person with goals and drive, the one who cared. We dared to notice. We brought up the future.

“So, you seem to be doing a lot better,” we started, tepidly. 

“Oh yeah. I feel a lot better. I am starting to get so excited about school. I mean it is literally less than a month away,” she said, eyes bright.

“Yeah, about that,” we began hesitantly. 

We wanted her to know we were proud of the progress she had made, but this was a serious conversation about an important issue. We had decided to talk to her as an adult, and that meant being honest about what our part in her future would be. 

“We know that you have an apartment and are enrolled in school,” we told her. “And we still very much support you doing that, but with what’s been going on these past few weeks, we aren’t sure we can totally trust you to be on your own.”

She swallowed and looked down; picked at her nails. We pressed on and laid out the next phase of her rehab.

“We are lifting all restrictions on you, but you are not going back to your apartment. You are going to live here until school starts. During that time, we need to know where you are going whenever you leave and the phone number of who you are going to be with. You need to finish summer school. We sincerely hope that you won’t drink, but if you choose to do that, you absolutely cannot drive and cannot stay at someone else’s house. You will call us to pick you up. 

“In the end, you will be 18 soon, and you need to decide what you want your life to be like,” my husband said. “We have raised you to make your own choices based on what’s right for you, because you are the one who has to live with them. You have to decide whether to drink or not because of the life you want for yourself, not because of what we want.” 

“However, if you do choose a rock-n-roll lifestyle, we don’t have to pay for it.” I chimed in, taking the bad cop role. “We told you we would pay for your rent while you are at college and doing your best, and that is true. But we are withholding the next nine months of rent from your savings account as an insurance policy. As long as you are doing your best in school and you keep your grades up,  we will return that to you each month. If you don’t, then you will pay for your own rent.”

She looked up, her face a mixture of surprise and surrender, and said, “OK.”

My feeding alarm goes off again, pulling me from memory into moment. Though the adult robins have been tending to the babies in the nest, they have not visited the feeder box baby. I check, and the bird is still breathing, so I offer it food again, but this time there is no response. I gently poke the beak a little at the side, and it opens weakly for a bit, but closes too quickly to put food in. I try again, and the beak opens wide enough to get a bit of worm in, but there is no swallowing motion. A few more tries, and I get the same results. The baby won’t, or can’t, eat. Still, I set my timer, unwilling to give up, and take my seat, holding my faith.

My daughter did what was asked and worked hard at summer school. She even said she found the familiar rhythm of school a comforting distraction. She finally told me she had been having nightmares since she had been home and wasn’t sleeping well. She shared that she has looked forward to college for so long, but now that it was here she was scared and nervous and would really like a drink sometimes. I wondered if she would break into the wine we have up in the cabinet and if I should remove it. We have never tried to build a bubble around our kids, choosing instead to try and prepare them for the world, to have conversations about scary things, an open door policy. They were raised with the Internet, so there is nothing they can’t see or discover if they want. But now that my kid is in that world, I find that I want to protect much more than prepare. 

With the return of the timer trill, I try again to feed the bird. It is breathing, but doesn’t open its beak or eyes at the worm’s touch. I keep my vigil and set the timer again, but I haven’t seen an adult bird go to the baby since it fell from the nest so many hours ago. I know the outcome, but I just can’t accept it. A worm and some water seem like such simple things to save a life, and I have them. But they just aren’t enough. I watch the sun drop below the trees, suspended into its slow decline.

My daughter passed her summer school classes with an A and a B, kind of miraculous, and she added walks to her daily routine. Showing signs of strength, she started asserting herself around the house. We had a fight about changes she made to the spare bedroom–her old bedroom–and I told her it wasn’t her place to change things in my house. Aching for her youth that has left so abruptly, we both cry and finally talk. She said she just needed to feel like she had some control over things. I said she needed to respect that this is our house. Neither of us meant to hurt the other. We were both angry and sad over the same thing–that her childhood was over. She let me hold her for a long time. 

I think that these displays of control and self-assertion are her hopping and flitting.  Her will has always been so strong, and she was shaken to discover that drinking might be a monster that she could not defeat only with the desire to do so. For the first time, maybe, she became aware that she can be overtaken.

It starts to get dark, and the chill pulls me from thoughts of my daughter into my body. I finally go inside, defeated and discouraged about the baby bird. I am made small with how powerless I feel in light of how even the simplest kind of help has failed. I look at the coat rack and see my daughter has taken my favorite hat and a jacket of mine she likes without asking. I smile with familiar irritation. 

The next morning my husband tells me he found the baby bird dead that evening and, by flashlight, dug a small grave. I am so thankful for his kindness, but ashamed that I could not care for the baby bird in death the way I tried to in life. That evening, just days before we will drive her back to school, we talk about the baby bird, and my daughter says she’s sorry and then adds, “Yeah, I didn’t think it was going to make it.”

“How did you know?” I ask, genuinely baffled. 

“I don’t know,” she says. “You can just tell.”

I can’t tell, I want to scream, I can’t tell at all. 

“It’s OK, Mom,” she says, breezily. “You tried.”