I still have not changed the ring volume on my phone. Every other contact is on silent. But their two numbers ring out loud no matter what I am doing, where I am, or who I am with. The moment I see their names on the screen I stop everything. Groceries stay in the cart.
Conversations get paused. I put them on speaker and just let them talk while I go about my day because I have learned that sometimes they do not need me to say anything. They just need to know that nothing in my world is more important than the sound of their voice telling me how their life is going.
My oldest calls me almost every day. Some of those calls run into hours. I listen and I think about the little girl who used to sit at our kitchen table doing schoolwork and I cannot quite reconcile her with the young woman in law school who now talks to me like a peer. I am still figuring out how to hold both versions of her at the same time.
My second daughter is still finding her way back to me. And that is okay. I am learning to be patient with the distance because I understand now that the distance is part of them becoming fully themselves.
The quiet of the empty nest is hard
It is not rejection. It is completion. But nobody told me it would feel like this. The quiet is the hardest part. I was warned about the empty nest. Everyone warns you about the empty nest. What they do not tell you is that the quiet is not just the absence of noise. It is the absence of a particular kind of aliveness that only exists when your children are under your roof.
I homeschooled my five children for fifteen years. That means I was not just their parent. I was with them every single day, all day, for the better part of their childhoods. The transition from that to this, to a house that holds their absence in every room, has been one of the strangest experiences of my life.
I worked toward this moment my entire parenting life
I do not go into their empty rooms if I can help it. I still take photos of everyone when we are together but something in me resists when I look at the pictures afterward. The missing faces make the ones who are there look incomplete somehow. Like a sentence with words left out.
My brain keeps counting and coming up short. It feels like grief and pride at the same time. I did not expect to mourn something I had worked toward my entire parenting life. You spend twenty years trying to raise children who do not need you and then they do not need you and somehow that feels like loss.
The empty nest is not loss exactly but transformation
But it is not loss exactly. It is transformation. The relationship does not end. It becomes something different. Something I am still learning the shape of. What I was not prepared for was carrying the grief and the pride simultaneously. Some days the pride wins.
I watch my oldest navigate law school with a confidence and clarity that takes my breath away and I think I did that. We did that. All those ordinary Tuesdays at the kitchen table built this person.
Other days the grief wins. I hear a song they loved or find something tucked in a drawer and the missing of them is so specific and so physical it stops me mid-step.
Most days it is both at once. I had to prove something too. I will be honest about something that is harder to say. When my children were young there were people who told me I was making a mistake. That I was being selfish or misguided or naive. That I was going to damage them. That they would not be socialized, not be educated, not be prepared for the world I was supposedly sheltering them from.
I carried other people’s criticism of my parenting in my head
I carried those voices for fifteen years. Some days they were louder than others. When my oldest walked into law school at twenty, when my second found her boat and rowed to the
Head of the Charles as a freshman, something in me exhaled that had been held tight for a very long time. It was not just pride. It was relief. The particular relief of having been right about something that mattered enormously and having no guarantee along the way that you were.
The haters were not right. I did not ruin my kids. That sentence probably sounds defensive to someone who was never doubted the way I was doubted. But if you know, you know. What I want every parent in this season to hear.
Some days the quiet feels peaceful and some days it feels unbearable, sometimes both in the same afternoon
The launched years are strange and hard and beautiful in equal measure. You will grieve things you did not know you were allowed to grieve. You will feel pride so fierce it almost hurts. You will have days where the quiet feels peaceful and days where it feels unbearable and sometimes both in the same afternoon.
You will learn to live in the in between. Present in your own life but always slightly tuned to the frequency of theirs. Waiting for the phone to ring. Stopping everything when it does.
And slowly, in ways you cannot predict or plan for, the relationship reshapes itself into something new. Your child begins to call you not because they need something but because they want to talk. Because something happened and you are the person they want to tell. Because the miles between you do not change the fact that you are still their person.
My oldest calls me almost every day. Sometimes for hours. It was the entire point. All of it, every hard year and quiet day and moment of doubt, was working toward exactly this. A
grown human who chooses to call her mother. Who trusts me with her real life not just the edited version.
I would do every bit of it again.
More Great Reading:
When My Sons Left and I Didn’t Cry: A Therapist on Letting Go of Adult Children
