By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

It’s hard to be the mother of two grown men with girlfriends. There is no definitive role for you. The other day over dinner, I hassled my 25-year-old son about not going to the dentist. That one went over like an abscessed tooth, especially because at that particular meal, we were a party of six with two dentists at the table. Even though I was told by my son that never again, under any circumstance, was I to speak of his teeth over dinner, yesterday he came out to see the dentist. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Last summer I got a frantic call from my other son at 8 in the morning; he was at a Weezer concert in Washington, DC, and his apartment in NYC had flooded. As we spoke, his girlfriend was collecting rainwater in buckets to stave off what were torrents of water flowing in after the collapse of a piece of roof right above their unit. My son’s question: should he go home and help, giving up Weezer and Washington? He sounded tortured; apparently, he was the designated driver for a group of friends who were counting on him for a ride home. Apparently, none of them had heard of Amtrak.

What I wanted to say was do you expect to marry Weezer? If so, stay right where you are. But I didn’t do that. I remained calm. I asked him what he thought he should do. I think he knew but didn’t want to say.

So I told him a theoretical story. I said to him that if I were his girlfriend and I were with a man who had chosen to remain at a concert while I collected pails from neighbors and mopped up water, forget it.  What he paid for tickets, be damned. I wouldn’t want to be with a person who chose Weezer’s “Africa” over Chelsea while I was trying to keep my apartment from being washed into the Hudson. But you do what you want, I said.

Sometimes, my boys, er men, say I butt in where no 57-year-old empty nester should go. Empty nests are overrated, but if I persist, I worry I’ll have even more leftovers than I already do at the holidays. I want my boys and their girlfriends to want to be with me.

However it’s hard to move from being a day-to-day mom to something far more ambiguous. I didn’t ask to retire.

In my dreams I still see their trusting little-boy faces, hear their innocent voices. I still smile when I think about the time my younger son said he didn’t like his day camp because the trees were taller than he was.

Incidentally my older son did come home early from his concert to offer support and scoop water. Of course he did. I’ll never tell him, but I consider it a significant maternal victory.