Kind, thoughtful friends have been checking in regularly. Those who have been through a sudden empty nest, and those who anticipate it and can imagine the pain. I have done it twice in the course of one week.
Late in August, I drove one daughter up to Baltimore, and she was moved in by Wednesday. Thursday was supposed to be my chance to catch my breath. I think I got about ten minutes of it. Friday I did the whole thing over again for her sister, forty-some miles down the highway in Washington, DC. There was a convocation on Saturday, then one more drive between the two campuses, and by late Sunday the house had us in it and nobody else.
The second goodbye surprised me more than the first
The second goodbye is the one that surprised me. You steel yourself for the first, and you survive it, and there is a stretch of interstate in between where you almost convince yourself the hard part is behind you. Then you are carrying boxes up another staircase, into another room that does not smell like her yet, and walking back out to a car with too much space in it.
Knowing what is coming does not soften the second one. It only slows it down. Most parents get a gap between departures, a year, four years, enough time to find their footing before the next one goes. Mine was a Thursday.
I walk past two empty rooms instead of one
I spent at least a year, if not 18 years, bracing for the ache of them both leaving at the same time, but nothing can prepare you for the unique flood of emotions of the first weeks and months afterwards.
The house feels so different now. It’s the absence of overlapping conversations, the quiet where borrowed clothes were fought over in two directions. I miss their presence, one of my daughters sitting next to me as we watch our favorite shows, the other at the dining room table with all of her schoolwork sprawled out, wanting my help planning her day or studying for a test.
I walk past two empty rooms instead of one. I am proud of both of them and grieving a version of our home that had two more people in it. I am relieved that the applications and the tours and the conversations are blessedly over. Pride and grief do not take turns, I have learned. They just sit next to one another.
Nobody tells you that raising twins means saying goodbye to both of them in the same breath
My work is pastoral, and before this I served as a chaplain in a hospital. Both callings amount to the same thing: keeping company with people in the middle of changes that nobody thinks to bring a casserole for. Not emergencies. Just the quiet reorganizing of a life, which everyone expects you to manage while still turning up to work on Monday. Nobody tells you that raising twins means saying goodbye to both of them in the same breath.
As I began this journey, I wished there was someone who could closely accompany me through it. I listened to podcasts, read articles and posts, including those here at Grown and Flown, and all of it helped. But an explanation of the empty nest was not what I was missing. I was already inside one. What I wanted was something that understood where I was in it.
So I started keeping a record. Nothing intended for anyone but me, a few lines most evenings, putting down how the day had gone rather than the version I had braced myself for.
It’s the ordinary afternoons where I wanted company and miss my girls
The second week and the second month are not the same country. Early on you are still turning up hair ties in the console of the car. A month later the phone has stopped ringing with people checking on you, and the silence in the house has stopped being an event and settled in as the weather. By November the dog still parks himself by the front door around four, and you are still buying for four and cooking for two, and none of that is dramatic enough for anyone to write about.
Those ordinary afternoons were where I wanted company. Not the milestones. The unremarkable Tuesday. Eventually the notebook stopped being private and became a book. Ninety days of short reflections, entries for the dates that ambush you, the first holiday without them, a birthday spent apart, the second departure after they come home for winter, and a blank page next to each one.
I published it as Empty Nest: A Daily Companion. It was the thing I had gone looking for and failed to find, so I ended up writing it myself. I am also currently working on an app with the same name.
Some days the house is just quiet. Other days it’s quiet in a way that feels, unexpectedly, like room to breathe for me, and maybe for them too, now that they finally have to.
More Great Reading:
Now That My Children are Grown, What is My Purpose?
