Empty Nest by Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s essay, “Empty Nest” tackles an array of difficult subjects: domestic violence, addiction, abuse, and, mixed into the collage, the harsh reality of parenting baby birds. She writes in her author’s note that the pivot from the story of her often volatile family life to the experience she has watching a mother robin care for her brand new babies is “a reprieve for readers” as she “temporarily shift[s] away from the trauma.” What’s particularly interesting, however, is the way that she has constructed what she calls the collage structure of her essay.
Rather than building a braided or mosaic essay with distinct sections, “Empty Nest” contains threads that overlap and interweave, not unlike a nest itself. The threads are referential, pointing back towards one another. Montgomery writes, “Like the robin, my mother crafts her home from what others discard,” and later on, “I give my mother birds because she cannot lift her eyes to the skies, too distracted by the fear of what’s right in front of her.” Although the parallel threads do lean towards metaphor, as Montgomery notes in her author’s note, they are so intrinsically linked that they cannot be extracted from one another.
In her craft essay, “Emotional Pacing: Lessons in Writing a Trauma Memoir,” Aggie Stewart speaks to the difficulty of storytelling when describing trauma, and the techniques that memoirists employ to write about these “injurious experiences artfully and intentionally.” Stewart says, “The way each writer emotionally paced her story was driven by her story’s message.” Here, Montgomery tells us from the very first line—“My youngest brother runs away from home again the morning the baby robins fly from the nest”— that the threads of her collage rely on one another, and that the emotional weight of these stories finds balance in one another. The second thread is not merely metaphor, nor merely emotional release, but the only way that her family’s story can be told. —CRAFT
My youngest brother runs away from home again the morning the baby robins fly from the nest.
All spring, I watch a mother robin build her nest under my deck. It rests next to the half-dozen hollowed-out husks abandoned seasons before. I wonder if she built those too, though I know it is unlikely—robins can live up to fourteen years, but the average life expectancy for these birds in the wild is just two years.
The mother is diligent, gathering bits of dead leaves and mud to craft her home from what others discard. When not building, she pecks at the lawn. Robins do not eat from the birdfeeder, prefer instead to do the difficult work of finding food.
Each day on the phone, I tell my mother about the bird’s diligence, while my mother tells me about her own. She became a mother when she was still a child, moving at nineteen from her parents’ home into my father’s, helping him to raise his eight-year-old son before birthing my sister and me, then whistling in the dark for the next forty years to call other children home.
My mother’s many children spread across many generations—ranging in age from fifty to fifteen, the last five children adopted from various birth families and traumas. Some are long grown, like my half-brother, my biological sister, and me, with partners and homes of our own. But my adopted siblings drift in and out of my parents’ home like the wind, returning when they struggle, dragging their own lost children for my mother to fix. Only one adopted sibling remains underage, but already my mother is fearful of what will happen when he leaves and she is alone.
Like the robin, my mother crafts her home from what others discard. An unwanted child, her parents used to say, an accident, her father mumbled when he was drunk. She took in children with their own severe abuse histories, the ones social workers told her were difficult to place. She kept the children no one wanted, children, who at two and three had already been rejected from dozens of foster homes.
It is clear from the start that the children would never learn to fly. Scars lined their bodies—a broken arm from when a parent got angry, cigarette burns down the length of a spine. Their bodies were marked from encountering so many drugs in the womb, from being hungry and homeless early on. Failure to thrive, social workers said, implying they would never grow strong enough on their own, would never survive the wild.
For the past several years, my youngest siblings have drifted in and out of jail, drug rehab, psychiatric facilities. They have been expelled from every local school for bringing knives, starting fights, selling drugs at recess. They are on house arrest, wear flashing ankle monitors, fail weekly drug tests, fight the police officers who arrest them. They punch the house so hard their hands require surgery. They headbutt walls, doors, shattering the porcelain shower stall like a tooth. They leave holes the size of their hurt in the wall around my mother’s body.
My mother mostly keeps their violence to herself when she is forced to discuss with the cops, probation officers, psychiatrists. She says they are angry, misunderstood. She says they are trying. I do not understand why she protects them but will not protect herself.
After my mother says my youngest brother is gone again—he ran off in the middle of a fight about his cell phone or his dinner or cleaning his room, even though he was just released from a psychiatric facility a few days ago—she asks about the birds.
I tell her about the mother’s dedication, the way she sheltered her eggs, now her chicks, warming them to life with the heat of her own heart.
I do not say that the chicks left while she wasn’t looking, leapt away from her headfirst and never looked back. I do not say they left before they even learned to fly.
I’ve long loved robins, the bright rust of their breasts against the dull gray of their bodies, the way they are beautiful without fighting for attention like the blue jays or cardinals. They are alert and earnest, unlike the slow pigeons, the aggressive red-winged blackbirds. Their legs are spindly but sure; their song rings out first each dawn.
A mother robin is a fiercely determined thing. I once watched a mother shield her nest in the middle of a Nebraska tornado, hunker down over her newly hatched chicks while hail hurtled her depleted body. She never deterred, simply spread wide her wings and claimed death if it meant the survival of her children.
Since my mother claims only hurt for herself, I give her birds, the delicate blue-green shells I find cracked open on the dewy grass. I describe them over the phone, the thousands of miles that separate me in Massachusetts from my family back in California.
The spring I turned thirteen, my mother mourned that her firstborn was nearly grown and adopted two-year-old twins. When I moved an hour away for college, my parents adopted two- and three-year-old brothers. The month I moved three hours farther for graduate school, they adopted a fifteen-year-old girl, tucked her into my childhood room. Each time, I was expected to come home weekends to help, the building chaos rushing all around me as soon as I arrived. The home was always full, restless and beating, my mother frantic to keep building her nest.
Now I have made a home in Massachusetts, for I flung myself from the nest when the many broken bodies in our house became too many to fit, when the violence began, addiction creeping into the cracks of our home. I give my mother birds because she cannot lift her eyes to the skies, too distracted by the fear of what’s right in front of her.
She finds needles and homemade pipes, one brother’s track marks, another’s bloody wrists. The children are always fleeing, glassy-eyed and distant, running or taken away in the back of a cop car. They pretend she is invisible; they say they wish she was dead.
Last year, my sister used meth, coke, everything else every day. Cops found her running into the sea, then barefoot down a freeway. She left her front door open, the hungry dog searching for her when she went to rehab, a psychiatric facility, the hospital. She said she would never stop using.
At home things are the same. Last weekend, my brother was arrested again for violence, drug use, and placed into psychiatric care. Another brother was frightened, got high, tried to die, was placed into psychiatric care. Another sister did the same, left her baby with my mother to check herself into the hospital. My mother watched the baby toddle the yard, tried to protect another chick not her own.
My siblings will not speak to our mother on the phone from the hospital or in the car when she drives to three different hospitals in three different counties the day they are simultaneously released and come back to live with her again. They ignore her on the long ride, stretch their hands out the open windows as if to fly away.
My mother is frantic, pacing the house for blankets, snacks, anything to make them more comfortable, anything to keep them safe. She is constantly running to the kitchen to feed them. She forgets to eat because they are already hungry and asking for more.
I give my mother the many halves of blue eggshells, pieces to a puzzle she is still working out. I give her the slender mottled feather of an American black duck at the edge of the still lake where I live. I give her the low swooping circles of the great blue heron through the fogged sky above the woods, delicate legs and graceful neck, feathers dripping like jewels when it comes home to roost.
When I lived in Nebraska to pursue a PhD, at the beginning of my flight away from her, I gave my mother the sandhill cranes, the way they traveled back to the same river’s edge for over a million years, for no matter how much time passes, they are always called home.
For several weeks, the mother robin sits low and squat over her eggs. She leaves for only a few minutes to find bugs in the grass, pull worms from the damp soil. She runs quickly, head down, darting about the yard. She rarely looks up from her duty, grows matted from dedication.
When another bird ventures too near her nest, she lunges. Even the ravens, their size and cruel temperament, do not frighten her. She darts like a bullet. What must it be like, I wonder, to feel ferocity despite or perhaps because of fear? To have instinct that compels you to protect rather than flee?
For too long, I have felt nothing but fear for my family, my relationship with all except my mother brittle and tenuous. For many years I slept at home with the doors locked, my siblings stealing from my parents before throwing them against the walls, threatening, even as young children, to blow up their schools, shoot their classmates.
There was something fierce and feral in their eyes from the start. They would not be held, though they pled for hugs and then thrashed in our arms, slapped or bit us in the face. They would not eat but then gorged until they purged. They tore off their diapers to masturbate and piss and shit on the stairs, at the dining room table, in the car, shouting they wanted to kill, wanted to die.
As toddlers, they hung dolls from nooses, captured animals and crushed them under their thumbs, wrapped their hands around their own necks. As teenagers, they cut themselves open, hid knives in their mattresses next to their drugs, beat classmates bloody. I know what they are capable of as adults, have seen their arrest records, the ways they will slit our tires, break our windows to get inside to steal from us, will break even each other’s bones to get what they want.
It is for my own survival that I have flown so far. I stay away to keep myself safe, cut contact because it pains me to hear the frantic song of my siblings. My mother is the only family member I have regular contact with and this is mostly because I feel a sense of duty to protect her. I am the only of her children who speaks to her without expecting money, bail, a car, a place to sober up. I feel, in many ways, that it is my responsibility to protect her, to see in her eyes the frightened child she was, like the ones she took in, like the one I became after my childhood home became the very thing I needed to survive.
Only twenty-five percent of robins in the wild survive the first year. My siblings were already marked for death when they joined our family. When my parents adopted my siblings, they were required to sign forms saying the children would likely injure themselves or others, would steal, start fires, would be prone to murder or suicide. I have long stopped wondering why my mother chose to adopt these children, what compelled her other than a maternal instinct. With her signature, my mother welcomed both life and death into the house.
I have put off becoming a mother because I have seen the sacrifice it requires and do not know if I could bear it. I have put off becoming a mother because I have missed my own mother so terribly, for she always seemed preoccupied by the promise of other children and no sooner had one set of children left the nest than she was building another, compelled by loneliness and duty, filling our home with other children who would leave. For me, motherhood has been a constant cycle of abandonment.
When I step too close to the window that looks out onto the robin’s nest, she scatters in a panic, arcs frantic circles around the yard, a clearing in several acres of dense woods. I watch her spiral as though she is signaling danger, smoke looping into oblivion.
When the chicks hatch, burst forth from their eggs, leaving shattered pieces in their urgency, their insatiable hunger to thrive, the mother sits low across them, flattens her body to make it wide and warm. She knows to ignore their squirming protests—for food, for sun, for movement. The world would swallow them whole without pausing to spit out brittle beak and bone. They would fall to their deaths, crush themselves on even the soft grass below before they even opened their eyes.
I stay far away, fearful she will abandon her nest if I venture too close. She eyes me warily when she spies me through the window inside my house. We stare each other down, this mother who will do anything for her children, and I, who have never understood my mother’s devotion to children who call her “bitch” as they lunge.
On the rare occasions that I fly home, watch the East Coast give way to the patchwork Midwest, then the smooth California coast, my migration back to the nest, I grow tense.
One brother is fresh out of jail and on the move again for racing cars, selling drugs, skipping out on taxes, another baby on the way. A sister’s baby stays with my parents because my sister is between jobs, between hospitals again. No one has heard from another sister since the last time she got out of rehab. The brother who still lives at home on house arrest turns his music up so loud the house pulses with his anger.
I barely recognize my siblings and sometimes wonder if we would know each other on the streets, if I would place them as my family if we were both lost in the dark woods.
Back in Massachusetts, I can hear the mother robin rustle when I step out on my deck. I spend afternoons in the sun, reading or watching birds through my binoculars. I try to hold as still and quiet as I can, but she knows danger is overhead; she knows the threat is in the house.
Sometimes she takes to the skies, flies straight to the sun as though she is giving up before heading down to glare at me from the ground. She tries to creep back covertly to her nest, a few inches at a time when I am not looking. If we make eye contact, she retreats, starts over. She will make herself sick before she will give up on her chicks. She is so miserable I go inside to give her peace.
The chicks spend every moment with their eyes closed and their mouths open. The mother they do not see is always bringing them food, intent on feeding others while she grows frail and pale, the red of her breast mussed, panic in her eyes. At first she regurgitates food for them, feeds them from her own body. Eventually she brings worms and bugs, and even though worms do not make up the majority of their diet, she will bring each chick up to fourteen feet of worms in their short nest time. She spends all the sunlight hours gathering, making one hundred or more feeding visits to her nest daily, pausing to warm their bodies with her own diminishing one.
Their vulnerability is alarming. I watch in fascination and fear. They are always threatening to starve, to tumble from the nest that is quickly too small for their writhing bodies. Even with her frantic pace, the mother cannot keep up; before she has filled their bellies, their mouths are already open again.
Over the phone, my mother says my youngest brother has run away again. He does this when he is bored or angry or sad, feelings he experiences frequently but will never talk about. Mostly he runs away when women like my mother or his teacher or his probation officer tell him “no” because he is a boy who will become a man who will not listen to a woman. Like my other brothers, he is a boy who is almost a man who grabs women by the shoulders and shakes them at the top of the stairs, watching them flap their arms, threaten to fall, unable to escape gravity.
Because I am not a mother, I do not understand why my mother tries so hard to help this child. She must be frightened to be alone when the last child finally leaves, for the only thing she says of her own childhood was how lonely she felt after her brother and sister left her alone with her abusive father and skittish mother. We talk long hours about what she will do when the nest is empty, how she is already fearful and forlorn without her children.
She does not know where my brother has gone this time, like the last and the dozen before. She spends long hours at the window, waiting for him to return, but all she sees is her reflection staring back. She calls, texts, sends her unwavering love chirping across phone lines.
When the baby robin flees the nest, it leaps by instinct, little reservation. A baby robin does not fully develop the muscles needed to fly until ten to fifteen days after leaving the nest, so the moment of departure is an act of faith.
The chick lands just a few feet below, its attempt at flight testing the reassurance of gravity. It learns to fly in short, violent bursts. I watch from my deck as the baby bird dots the yard, makes its way through the short grass of my lawn to the tall meadow behind, wild pink grasses flowers towering overhead.
The chick looks up, compelled to enter the wild because this is what nature and nurture have instructed. It stands a long while, assessing how to move through this new terrain. I worry it will be lost, worry it will starve, worry the wild coyotes, the foxes that frequent the yard will find the soft, trusting mouthful. In the wild, innocence becomes liability.
From a distance, the mother robin watches the children leave. To ensure their survival she must let them fail, then swoop in to save them. The chicks are so intent on strengthening their wings they forget they are still unable to eat on their own, so she brings worms to sustain their exodus, then flies away once more to watch. When they wander, she follows, just out of sight.
By midday, all the baby robins have abandoned the nest. She doesn’t return to her empty home and it sits like a shroud with the rest.
The chicks cluster in the center of the yard together, unsure what to do. If they see me or any other perceived threat they take to the skies. Fleeing is instinct when you’ve learned all the ways the world will hurt you. No sooner do they flee than they fall, survival threaded through with suffering.
When she loses sight of her children, the mother sends a loud chirp through the wooded clearing to call them back to her. She will ease them into independence over the coming weeks, even as she begins building a new nest for the next children. As the days pass, her chirps echo through the air, for long minutes, sometimes an hour, her whole body heaving with the effort of her call.
Like its impulse to fly, a bird instinctively thrashes when caught.
I call my mother for help when a baby robin flies into the fence. From my perch, I watch the creature flail, its weak wings captured in the chain link until I fear them broken. Eventually the bird grows tired, rolls in a tangle to the ground near the road where it sits, dazed, maybe dead.
I weep, panic. I want to help but do not know what is best. If I approach the bird, I fear its mother will abandon it after her many careful weeks. If I rescue the bird, bring it inside, it might grow weak and dependent, unable to survive alone or in the wild. It is impossible, this choice, this desire to see a creature survive despite all the ways the world would have it dead.
Despite the many years since I left home, the many miles between us, my belief I am grown and capable, my mother’s weariness as she once again waits to see if her youngest child will return to the nest, I call her for help.
“There’s not much you can do,” she says over the phone like I have said to her about my siblings so many times before. “Once a robin leaves the nest, you can’t put it back.” She tells me to leave the bird, to let it wake from the shock and try to make its way in the world. She reminds me the mother robin is likely nearby, so shrewd in her skill that she is just out of sight. As always, my mother reassures me.
I inquire after my brother, who has still not returned. My mother hopes he is not using again, is not hurt again, sitting at the side of the road dazed, maybe dead.
We hang up, each of us accepting there is nothing we can do.
I think of the robin as afternoon slips into evening. The other baby robins hop about the yard, downy feathers speckling their breasts, though with just a day in the sun they are already beginning to redden. In a few days the birds will be as large as their mother, will leave her care completely.
I wonder if she will even recognize them in the dark woods.
Later at night as I prepare for bed, I pause at the window. Spring is turning to summer and the sun stretches the days in a way that seems to make time slow. The sun is setting purple and orange through the forest clearing.
Alone in the yard sits the mother robin. I recognize her frail body and hunched hurry across the yard, though her babies are nowhere nearby. Most of the other birds have perched themselves into the trees to sleep for the night and the frogs have begun their nightly choir.
I know she will be there long after I close the curtains, will already be at work and worried when I open them in the morning. I know that despite the danger of owls and hawks, she will circle spirals in the dark, looking down, down, even in flight, at the danger right in front of her. I know she will sleep restless, turning on her perch to see if her children come home.
When the mother robin sees me at the window she stops, stares. She knows I am watching as I have done these many weeks. She freezes.
We look at one another until the sun sets, until all I see is my reflection staring back.
But I know she is there, alone and staring into the woods, calling for her children who have left the nest, long after the sun goes down and they are already gone.
SARAH FAWN MONTGOMERY is the author of the craft text Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice and Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, which The Atlantic says, “Exemplifies a nuanced approach to life with mental illness” and The Paris Review describes as “The wake-up call that we need.” She is also the author of the essay collection Halfway from Home, winner of a Nautilus Book Award for lyric prose, the flash collection Abbreviate, and three poetry chapbooks. She is the founder and editor in chief of Nerve to Write, a magazine for disabled, chronically ill, and neurodivergent writers, and an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University. Find her on X @SF_Montgomery and on Instagram and Facebook @sarahfawnmontgomery.
Featured image by Ginger Jordan, courtesy of Unsplash.
