Empty Nest: New Column on Life After Your Children Leave Home

I am trying to remember exactly when I lost the job I have held for the last 18 years. “Fired” is probably too strong a word, since I am talking about motherhood, and since I will cling to some of my responsibilities until the end of my days. Maybe it happened at the beginning of Sam’s freshman year of high school, when he walked a brisk 20 paces ahead of us to the bus stop, until a neighbor suggested to us that maybe he no longer needed an escort. Friday night family dinners ended the same year. Instead of just telling us he’d rather be with friends, Sam proceeded to turn dinner into a kitchen sink drama.. He lectured us relentlessly on idiotic teachers and bumbling school administrators. My husband, John, began to mutter “often wrong, never in doubt” every evening, under his breath, like he was saying grace. I’m sure, too, that the pink slip was in the mail the day Sam got his much-anticipated driver’s license some 15 seconds after awakening on his 16th birthday.

From then on, he became less like a child and more like a (usually) pleasant boarder in our home. He promised to bring up his grades—no, he didn’t need a tutor or any parental help, thank you—and he did. This was followed by the arrival in our lives of an adorable sprite of a girlfriend, who now has understandable priority over his every waking moment. (“You’ll know when they are really serious, because he won’t be able to stay in the same room with you,” my friend told me, and she was right.)

We had a brief a return to the Have You Done Your Homework era during the college application flurry last fall. (“This is my story, not yours,” Sam snarled during one essay-editing session, reminding me why I’ve never wanted to be an editor.) But the day the hefty acceptance letter arrived from his first choice was indisputably the end and the beginning of something. I grabbed the envelope and raced to Sur La Table, where Sam was working after school, and (not missing the metaphor) found him about to ascend a ladder that reached nearly to the ceiling. I heard the words of my friend Lisa, whose son had just received his own fat envelope: “It’s real,” she’d said, and it was. Sam would soon be leaving home, ostensibly forever. Even as I was ecstatic for him, a new question was forming in my mind—a question that I will explore in a series of columns over the coming year. What the hell was I going to do with myself now?

If you are anything like me, and I suspect readers of Double X are, this question will catch you by surprise. I never saw motherhood as the ultimate goal—or as any goal, really. I worked almost all of my child’s life. As such, I was always unprepared for the joys that raising Sam brought me. (Maybe that’s the best way? Stealth parenting?) I loved being the room mother who got to buy bags of toxic chips and boxes of sugar-shock cupcakes. I loved going to PTA and Cub Scout meetings, watching Sam’s friends grow up—even the one who is now on probation for dealing drugs. I learned to control my worst helicopter mom tendencies. (“How much did you enjoy spending time with your boyfriend’s parents when you were a teenager?” our childless family therapist asked me pointedly. “But we’re interesting,” I countered, purposely missing the point that to teenagers, no adults are interesting.) As Sam grew up, I somehow fantasized that having a busy career and engaging hobbies (yoga, psychotherapy) would inoculate me against our inevitable parting and save me from the classic empty nest syndrome. Not for me, the emptynestsupport.com (“Learn how to find peace and contentment when the children leave home”) or buying Chicken Soup for Empty Nesters or, God forbid, paying $500 or so for a weekend workshop in Orlando to teach me how to reconnect with my spouse.

Fat chance. I’ve learned over the years that the process loftily known as “separation” can feel more like a first-degree burn. Sure, I am insufferably proud of my son and his ability to function in the world. Among other things, it’s evidence that my husband and I did our jobs. And I’m a little relieved that the years of juggling work, home, marriage, and that fictional “me time” are virtually behind me. But because we were so fixated these last couple of years on the college push, it never really sunk in that Sam would go, and then what? I would have to restart my life again. Who has the time, or the desire, to think about that? My husband is already anticipating a future in which he travels to New York and takes Sam out to dinner—and then goes back to his lonely hotel room. I haven’t been able to go there yet. It is the blessing and the curse of child rearing that we live in the present, moving forward only when our kids move into another stage. Only then do we pick up their toys and follow gamely behind.

Maybe I can still cling to that rule for a little while longer. Sam graduates in a few weeks—we are busy designing graduation invitations—and then there’s orientation in New York, and then…packing. Friends have told me to look forward to a difficult summer—“Ignore everything he says to you,” one warned. “He won’t mean it”—and I’ve already noted some signs of regression. He’s spent the last few nights getting reacquainted with his Game Boy and taking up a coloring book, from the Museum of Modern Art, supposedly intended for grownups.

But he knows where he’s going, physically at least, and I’m envious of that. Just before prom last week, several parents gathered at a friend’s house to take pictures of the kids before the party. Sam and his friends were in high spirits, beautiful in their shiny tuxes and low-cut gowns, tolerating our adoration but eager to get on with things. For the parents it was different: We just kept snapping and snapping, trying to catch the fading light.