Living in an empty nest was not a long-awaited dream for Judy Ravkind – it was a nightmare. Her son, the youngest child, graduated from Lake Highlands High School in the early ‘90s, but by that time, her two older daughters were living and working in Dallas, even buying homes and starting families.
“I thought, well, I’m going to have the beautiful luxury of having all of my children around me,” Ravkind says.
But a few years later, both of her daughters moved to Houston within months of each other, and Ravkind found herself alone and depressed. For years she mourned the loss of her daughters.
“You would have thought someone had died in the family the way I acted the first year those girls had moved. I would wake up and cry at four in the morning,” Ravkind says.
It didn’t help that she was an only child with both parents gone and with a husband whose job requires him to travel much of the time. Ravkind works part time as a Louis Vuitton service specialist and has since her children were young, but that wasn’t how she defined herself. With her first child born less than a year after she married, her identity for decades had been wrapped up in motherhood.
“When you’re a mother, I think you tend to live for or through your children, especially when you’re thrust into motherhood that young,” Ravkind says. “You don’t really have any opportunity to step back and grow.”
The pressure to just “get over it” and enjoy the empty nest life wasn’t any comfort. But looking back, Ravkind realizes that it was all for the best. All the alone time forced her to begin approaching life with the question, “Who the heck am I?”
Along her journey of reinvention, she experienced an epiphany after dropping her husband Alan off at the airport, a common occurrence in Ravkind’s life. After almost 38 years of marriage, she describes them as “soulmates” who “still have that spark between us,” and was feeling especially ready that morning for the day when they could spend regular quality time together, instead of just a few days at a time.
By the time 11 p.m. rolled around, Ravkind couldn’t watch television, couldn’t read and still couldn’t shake the feelings. So she followed her therapist’s advice – start writing. She scribbled her thoughts on a notepad, threw it in a drawer, and went to bed.
When she awoke the next morning and reread her musings, she was surprised to find that they were actually good. With Father’s Day around the corner, she mustered up her courage and sent the poem to an old college friend who works in Nashville, asking him if he would put it to music as a gift for her husband.
She almost didn’t open his reply e-mail.
“I was terrified. I thought, it’s going to sound stupid, and I’ve probably embarrassed myself,” Ravkind says. “But he was blown away by the song. It pushed him to tears.”
Her friend was so moved that he requested her permission to publish and pitch it in Nashville. Within weeks, Ravkind received a studio-recorded CD of the country ballad “Hello and Not Goodbye” and a Skyline Music Publishing contract naming her as the song’s composer. With thousands of songs floating around the industry, she knows its chances of being selected for an album are slim, but the company’s belief in her words is satisfaction enough.
“I thought, how many women are out there like me?” says the 59-year-old Ravkind. “You’re never too old to try something, even if it seems silly. You just never know what is within you.”
If the inspiration hits Ravkind, she may write another song, she says, but for now she’s happy to continue finding herself.
And anyway, she says, Houston is just a car ride away.
