Sharing is hard after nest is empty

All of us were taught the right message when we were kids: It’s good to share.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s easy.
That’s especially true when you reach a certain age and are set in your ways and the kids have moved out of the house and you enjoy just letting your hair down. Or, in other words, when you are like me.
Other parents our age sometimes talk about “empty nest” syndrome, a sense of loss that the kids are growing up and have “nests” of their own.
That’s never been a problem at our house.
Much as we love our daughters, we’ve delighted in the ability to make the house a place just for the two of us. That has translated into changing the twins’ bedroom into the master bedroom and changing Sally’s room into a real, grown-up guest room.
But, as it turns out, when people learn you have a guest room, you find yourself with guests.
Our first this summer was David, an Arts in the Parks artist from Detroit. He was a great guy, about 35-years-old, who has done some very cool work in movie special effects, make-up and float building. The fact that he had what I thought of as a “Sideshow Bob” haircut didn’t really bother us.
But having a third person in the house when you are used to just two personalities within those walls took some getting used to.
David was a super short-term tenant. The three of us enjoyed watching women’s World Cup soccer over dinner, and he was so quiet we barely knew he was here.
And yet he was. Any time there’s an extra personality in the house, you know it.
Years ago, we asked our kids if they were interested in hosting a foreign student. My family had hosted an American Field Service student from Uruguay in 1960-61, and Connie’s family had hosted a student from the Philippines in the 1970s.
But our kids were not interested. They were friends with foreign students at school, but they valued their personal space enough that they didn’t want to share it.
We figured that David the artist would be our experiment in sharing this year.
Then the floods hit.
Chris Schanz, the sports editor of The Commercial Review, woke up one Tuesday morning to have his carbon monoxide detectors going off. He rents a downtown apartment, and his landlord was running gasoline-powered pumps to rescue the basement. In doing so, he nearly killed Chris. And by late afternoon, the apartment still wasn’t habitable.
So it was sharing time again. Chris came home with the boss, joined us for dinner and a baseball game on TV, and made use of the guest room.
Awkward to be a house guest of the boss? I’m sure it was.
Awkward to host an employee overnight? A little bit, but I’m trying to get better about sharing.