Oh, for the uncomplicated melancholy of the empty nest! These days, aging boomers may feel they are shouldering a greater burden: parenting their adult children. There is much hand-wringing over the lack of direction among these twenty- and thirtysomethings. Will they ever be fully independent? Counterintuitively, perhaps, parents are driven to help. To further complicate matters, their kids—who are no longer kids — are choosy about the help they will accept. This push-pull could well be the trickiest stage of parenthood, something those who invented the generation gap weren’t prepared for. Perhaps that explains why they tend to blame their progeny. Take a step back, however, and it becomes clear that this isn’t necessarily about “kids today,” but rather how the culture of family is changing.

e watched him disappear into airport security. He walked with his usual bounce, even though he wore a towering backpack, with a pair of sneakers and a water bottle tied to the top. As the opaque glass doors slid shut behind him, he didn’t turn around, but I waved anyway. Maybe it was the kind of glass he could see through on his side but we couldn’t on ours.

Then we drove home in an undefinable state, without saying much. There didn’t seem to be anything left to say. I had already had all my feelings about our twenty-year-old son dropping out of university to hit the road — or “taking a semester off to travel,” as I preferred to call it. I had already been sad, annoyed, alarmed, and finally excited, because that’s how he felt about this adventure. He was taking a cheap flight to Las Vegas to “ramble around” the southwestern desert. Hitchhiking, alone. Then he thought he’d head down to Mexico for a while.

Mexico is very big, I pointed out.

I reminded him that the era of hitchhiking was long over, and that in 2003 only serial killers and hookers would want to stand around on some ramp in Nevada. But for Casey there was a romance going on. He had Woody Guthrie’s hoboing, and probably Chuck Berry’s “Route 66” on his mind: Well if you ever plan to motor west / Just take my way, that’s the highway, that’s the best.

On the way back from the Toronto airport, I gazed out the car window at the floral sculptures along the highway, advertising insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Not the Wild West by a long shot. I told myself it was perfectly normal for a twenty-year-old to test himself. Boys are going to put themselves in harm’s way, one way or another, and getting a degree in history is only dangerous if you plan on making lots of money. A couple of footloose months, I thought, and he’d be back at McGill, grinding out essays on medieval concepts of time, and post-colonialism in Africa.

I knew how useless a B.A. had become. But I was a mother, evidently a chronic condition. The parent part of my brain had swollen to such unseemly proportions that I still believed university was the last good daycare, the safest channel to a secure future in our unravelling, unforgiving world.

Promise you’ll come back and finish your degree, Brian and I argued, in our mild way.

He didn’t say no. But he’d wait till he got back to make up his mind.

I did what I could; I went down to Mountain Equipment Co-op and bought him a small, shiny camp stove. A shard of home. He reassured us that he would stay in touch, although not by cellphone. Historically, hoboes didn’t carry cellphones. He would email us regularly from Internet cafés. Every village in Mexico has one, he said.

There were no fights about this, either, but then conflict has never been our forte. Brian’s family is British, and his mother’s mantra, to which I aspire, is “Never mind!” Casey has always been civil and tactful with us, but firm, as if negotiating with slightly impaired part-time employees.

So off he went, holding his brown cowboy hat with the curled-up brim, a gift from his gently departing university girlfriend. Lindsay was taking an exchange semester abroad, in Hong Kong. Sensible girl!

I shouldn’t have been surprised by this turn of events. After all, Brian and I had both spent most of our twenties kicking around the world, ignoring the future. But in those days, the generation gap worked like email in reverse: the point was not to stay in touch. The technology of the day reinforced the gap, since long-distance phone calls were expensive and the connections were poor; on a call from Burlington, Ontario, to Greece, my father’s voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of the ocean (which it was). Airmail letters took forever. They sat scattered around Europe in American Express offices, waiting weeks for us to show up and claim them, if we didn’t change our itinerary. And back home, nobody opened the front door to check the mailbox twenty times a day.

Once we left, we were gone. And what our parents didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.

ack in 1969, my family accepted the notion of a postgrad European trek, preferably with a Eurail Pass in hand. It counted as continuing education; we were “broadening” ourselves. My mother and father came from hard-working, poorish prairie families, where they were the first generation to graduate from university. An education meant everything. That was what travel signified, too: marble statues and historical ruins, not hitchhiking in strange cars and smoking dope in Amsterdam cafés.

Or living in caves.

That winter, I was travelling in Europe with my boyfriend, a tall, poetry-writing lad from another nice family who would clearly protect me from being drugged in a bar and bundled off to the white slave trade. In those days, the hippie trail led east from London to India; south to Ibiza; or to Greece and the caves of Matala, which a feature in Life magazine had already made semi-famous. (Joni Mitchell was apparently there around the same time and wrote the song “Carey.” I also read somewhere that several years later, the bubonic plague broke out and the idyll was over.)

After moving into a spacious cave with a view of the sea, I updated my family on our itinerary.

“The three of us are living in a small fishing village on the southern coast of Crete,” I wrote to them, having invented a chaperone-ish third party to offset the unavoidable domestic overtones of living with my boyfriend in a cave. “This is a Greek archaeological site,” I added (educational). “The cliffs have rows of man-made caves that date back to the neolithic period, where travellers can stay for free” (frugality and budgeting). “We are staying in one of the larger caves. It’s very nice, and has a door” (a tarpaulin). “The ocean is clean and perfect for swimming. The local fishermen sell fresh fish on the beach” (nutrition). “We’re getting a tan and enjoying a rest after being on the road all winter.”

Ah, the daughterly wiles of the young suburban hippie.

I just assumed the gap between my mother’s life and mine was unbridgeable. She had met my father when they were thirteen and fourteen, and by their mid-twenties they had married and had their first child. She dated a few others along the way, and had the odd crush on other men. I recall some stories about a dashing fighter pilot — is there any other kind? — named Ernie McNab who once flew low over the university campus in his plane and waggled his wing tips at her. But the concept of sleeping with different guys just because you were attracted to them, for fun, was new to her. And yet she struggled to approve; it made sense to her, to try them out before you settled for one. As she used to mildly, somewhat admiringly muse to me, as I pursued the single life into my thirties, “Yes, you’ve had a lot of boyfriends.”

She never criticized me for not marrying. (I capitulated anyway, at fifty.) But she worried that I would get hurt. Which, of course, I did. It became a bit of a pattern, in fact. I had talked myself out of wanting anything resembling commitment, but that turned out to eliminate too much.

Her reply to my letter describing our cave life was tactful and carefully upbeat. She caught me up on the family news — all good, in the style of the Christmas form letter, in which no doubt or heartache intrudes. Then she gave me a recipe for Irish soda bread, easily cooked in an iron frying pan, on an open fire.