Half a Step Over

Is Empty Nest Syndrome Really That Bad?

So many of my friends have dreaded the departure of their children for college. What would the kids do without them? What happens if they get sick? Said children needed to be within 90 minutes of driving distance so their mothers could get to them quickly if they had a cold. Maybe the kids should get home at least every other weekend.

My question, and everyone would look at me like I grew three heads, was, why are we obsessing on this? Didn’t we raise our children to be good kids? Don’t we trust them? Ultimately, shouldn’t they leave anyway when their educations are done and they go off to forge their own careers and start their own families? Yes, in today’s economy that might be a bit of a pipe dream, but it should be what we want for our children—shouldn’t we?

I like to think that I raised my daughters in a way that allowed them to go off to college knowing that they could handle most of what came at them. They knew how to study; they knew how to make friends; hopefully they knew that drugs and alcohol were not their best choices as a big part of their lives. But some things I couldn’t teach them unless they left home; and we were at the other end of the phone line, and could be there in just a few hours in the event of an emergency.

Returning to the empty nest problem: I sent one daughter off to college in the late ‘90s; the second left in the early 2000s. I had three years with just one child at home…then, no one. When the second one left, I was okay. All right, I cried a couple of tears as we left her standing alone amid several hundred freshmen waving good bye to their families. But it didn’t really hit me hard for quite a few weeks. Then, one night, I came home late from work, my husband was out of town (he was traveling a lot for business at that time), and the house was dark. And there was no one to talk to. We won’t even get into the part where I was hoping someone (maybe the cooking fairy) would have made me dinner after a long day. That was a startling moment and not easy to get over. I really had to start to think about what I was going to do.

The next weekend, we set up a light in the kitchen that went on automatically at a certain time so I didn’t walk into a dark house. That fixed a lot of problems. I walked in and could turn on the radio right away—there were no iPods or tablets in my life then to keep me company—for the noise value. And I had to start to think ahead a little more on meals. It could be handled.

And there were positives in the empty nest; they just took a little longer to find. I was able to go out more in the evenings without checking to make sure the children had something to eat/read/do in my absence. Yes, the high school student is quite capable of taking care of him/herself but you know we like to keep an eye on them when they live under our roof—even if we can’t see them. I had dinner with friends in the same position; could go to a meeting 20 miles away; sign up for a class I never thought to take before. Plus, if I wanted to go to bed at 7:30, I could. And I had some peace and quiet at the end of the day that allowed me to come down from some high-stress days at the office. Ultimately, it turned into a good thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I love when my family is here with me; we enjoy each other and have a lot of fun together. And my daughters still look for private time with their mother to just talk about their lives. When things get crazy, I just walk away and spend 15 minutes, usually in my bedroom, to regain some inner calm. Reality is that an empty nest, while traumatic when it first happens, can be survived. And life can be enriched by it.

Oh, and that light in the kitchen? We still have it. Not walking into a dark house always makes things better.