Empty Nest: It's the Men Who Suffer When the Kids Leave

Over the years, I spent a lot of time with various mental health professionals trying to learn to be less invested in my child’s progress—“It’s not your homework,” one therapist told me sternly. Once Sam, my one and only son, left for college, I was sure I would regress. But that hasn’t been the case. Instead, these last few months have felt more like a melancholy blessing, as Sam has moved into a new stage of life with remarkable grace and I have been able to cheer him on from the sidelines. What’s surprised me most is that I have made this transition more easily than my infinitely sensible, infallibly good-natured husband. The cliché of the mom who takes to her bed once the child flies the nest seems to be just that, I am learning. Instead, my anecdotal research shows that it’s the dad who needs the cold compress and the fluffy comforter.

I think I understand how this unexpected gender reversal happened. I’ve written before that having one’s mother die just a week before your child goes off to school has a way of putting things in perspective. But I also have to confess to dreading Sam’s departure for, oh, at least one and probably two years before he left. And that dread turned out to be a kind of preparation. In my head, I had been running though all the mundane details of life with him—packing lunches, signing permission slips, RSVPing to birthday parties, right up to the college applications. I was reliving every moment from the day he was born, a sweet-smelling boy who turned into a big smelly hulk in the bed and also into a joyous presence in our house, making jokes at my expense, talking about Shakira or Lady Gaga. And I did not know it but that whole time I was going through a powerful, preemptive grief.

Knowing that the end was near, I also made sure that when Sam wanted to spend time with his mother I made myself available. Shopping at Target?! Why, I’d love to! I didn’t sign up for life drawing classes starting in September or schedule long meditation weekends with girlfriends or even visualize where I might like to be in five years; I just moped around Sam’s room when he wasn’t there, imagining that it would be soon be empty for good. But that turned out to be the useful thing to do. John, of course, did nothing of the kind: “I don’t worry about things until they happen,” he told me one night last August. I briefly considered belting him, probably because I thought he was right.

When the day of departure finally came—when we left our 18-year-old alone on a New York City street—I was weeping, but I wasn’t surprised. John had a profoundly different reaction: On the flight back home, I realized he wasn’t staring out the window for three hours because he enjoyed the view. Over the next few weeks, he appeared to be in something of a fugue state. He turned on the lights in Sam’s room in the evenings. He highlighted Sam’s course schedule and left it in the dining room where he could check it every day, and began reading some of the books from Sam’s Disease in America class. He seemed  … bereft.

John was not alone. When one of my friends didn’t miss a beat once her daughter left, her husband went off the deep end. “You don’t care about her at all!” he shouted, just as she was sitting down—happily—to a romantic dinner for two. “Don’t you just love to go into his room and smell him on his sheets?” a (male) friend whose daughter had just left asked me. I couldn’t do that because our housekeeper (female) had already cleaned up what was left of Sam’s dirty laundry but, I have to say, it also didn’t occur to me to do anything remotely like that.