Empty Nest #3

“Mom, don’t be sad or sick, because the world will stop spinning too.” That’s what I experienced when I saw my mother when her daughters left home to continue their studies abroad. Things I never imagined before. In psychological theory, the phenomenon of deep loss that parents feel as a result of separation from their child is usually called Empty Nest Syndrome. Empty Nest Syndrome refers to the stress, sadness, sorrow, and/or loneliness experienced by parents, due to leaving home as an adult, continuing school, or getting married. However, it turns out that what my mother experienced directly is a snapshot of a phenomenon that cannot be separated from people’s lives related to gender issues, women’s work roles, and culture in society. In terms of gender, mothers experience greater psychological pressure than fathers when their children are abandoned. This is because mothers spend more time and energy caring for children and form strong attachments (Mitchell & Lovergreen, 2009). Powel (1977) also found that mothers who do not work are very susceptible to Empty Nest Syndrome. From this, we can see that the imbalance of gender roles between women and men in the domestic sphere and caring for children causes mothers to experience psychological stress. According to Borland (1982), cultural background influences the norms, roles, and expectations in a person’s life, including the form and family relationships. In patrilineal culture, women are limited by husbands as mothers and wives which causes women’s happiness to depend on relationships with their husbands and children (Han, 2018). To represent this phenomenon, I created a work entitled Empty Nest. I build a nest containing domestic items that remind me of my mother. When we have the distance these domestic objects become like a substitute for my attachment to my mother’s presence. Objects that appear include prayer mats that my mother often reminds me to pray, minyak tawon because my mother likes to be massaged with the oil, etc. To show the metaphor of emptiness, I made a cobweb that fills the installation space of this work.