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What I Am Thinking as I Stare Down an Empty Nest

This is the paradox of parenting. I’ve raised them to be secure enough to forge their own paths, while I enter my empty nest phase.

The mothers who came before me told me it would happen like a slow-drip. The carpools would cease. The kids would begin to make plans on their own. They would develop self-sufficiency. Then, it would be sudden. They would be gone into the world, forging their own way.

They couldn’t have predicted how a global pandemic would create a ripple with these changes, pausing progress until suddenly it happened all at once. Kids working, going out, driving in cars with friends. Ripping off a bandage is too cliché but it’s still the most apt description.

But when I woke up one morning this spring, eight months after dropping my eldest at college for the first time and two days after dropping my youngest at the airport for a week in Europe, it hit me: I’m here. The end of my active parenting days are nigh.

Over the next 18 months, my daughter will apply to colleges, get acceptances and denials, make a choice, graduate and I will drop both my kids off to colleges for the fall semester. And then it will be just me — an empty nester. A 40-something single mom who has only been on a couple dates since a long-term relationship ended nearly two years ago. A writer who moved to Maine to raise her kids, without any kids at home.

I will be truly solo — without kids, a boyfriend or a partner — for the first time since college. Me, in an empty nest.

What’s that going to be like, I wonder.

None of that is to say that parenting is over. It’s not. I will still drop my son off and pick him up from college 12 hours away. I’ll arrange his travel during the year as well. My daughter will still need me too. They will call me when they have trouble with classmates or relationships or navigating some facet of adulthood that’s new to them. I am still their mother and parenting is still something I do — it will still be something I do.

But it’s changing.

The day-to-day rhythms of our lives are shifting. When my son is away at college, I don’t oversee plan meals the way I did when he was in high school. And when my daughter leaves for college, there will be a vast disruption in the house as I figure out how to grocery shop for one and what a schedule without dance class drop offs and school events looks like. We’ll have our final conversations checking in about daily homework and then it will be a new phase for both of us.

Still, there is time left – though I know it’s fleeting. My children are both home this summer. We will eat dinners, hit the farmers market and stop by the garden together. We’ll hike and travel too. We took a European trip that exceeded my expectations. I am savoring these moments. All of them. Even the hard ones.

But it’s coming — the inevitable shift. In autumn, my son will be back at college. My daughter will start her senior year of high school. That inevitable end will be on the horizon.

I don’t want to stop time but I do wish I could slow it down a bit. We’re in a season of change and I’m afraid that if I blink, I will miss something.

This is the paradox of parenting.

If I have done my job as a parent, my children will feel free and secure enough to head out into the world without me. They will make good choices most of the time and ask for help when they need it. They will seek out learning and take the opportunities that arise. They will explore and adventure and forge good lives. And they will always know that they have a home with me.

This is what I want for them. And yet, it doesn’t make it any less bittersweet for me that it’s happening. I’m staring down an empty nest, but I want to enjoy the last year of this season of life first.

Published inEssaysParentingThe Blog

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