It’s a rite of passage: Young people go off to college.
As the last one does, their parents have their own milestone: They become empty nesters.
Do they celebrate? Mourn? Do both?
“06880” culture correspondent Robin Moyer Chung is one of Westport’s newest empty nesters. She writes:
Last Thursday, I moved my youngest child to the University of Utah, roughly 11 hours door-to-door when factoring in flight delays.
To keep myself occupied, and because misery loves company, I threw myself into an unscientific research project: What is it like to be an empty nester?
Robin Moyer Chung and True Chung at the University of Utah.
Personally, I’m freaked out by the prospect of rattling around my home of 20 years by myself. I rummage through drawers, pulling out kids’ games that haven’t been opened in 12 years and plastic bags full of broken seashells with their names scrawled in black marker.
Everything hits hard now that it’s over.
Unlike so many other life transitions — graduations, birthdays, funerals — there is no ceremony or celebration, no group therapy or organization. It’s just walking into your home and realizing your family is no longer there, a sort of “The most important part of your life is over” meets “Welcome to your twilight years.”
Gail, Kate and John Coykendall at Southern Methodist University.
For a few, it’s sweet liberty. “I embrace it all,” notes one mom. “I think I’m the only one who loved it!” adds another.
For many, however, it’s heartbreaking.
One mom summed it up: “I did not realize how much grief I would feel when my son left for college. We prepare them for this day, but I don’t think moms are prepared enough.”
While seasoned “parentes relicti” assure us the flown will fly back, the biggest question is: Who will they be when they do? Will the kid alighting on the perch be the same one who left?
Well, no.
Mattias and Christina Basler at the US Military Academy.
“The hardest part for me isn’t that they left for college, but knowing the chapter with them ‘growing up’ and living full-time at home has closed,” one mom explains.
While their childhood chapter closes, a lousy chapter often opens for the parents: loneliness.
The kids are gone, along with their social infrastructure. No more seeing parents and kids at soccer games and tournaments, no more grouping with other adults to build sets for musicals, no more raising money for choir concert tours. Happily or not, you’re expunged from the public-school email lists.
Parents celebrate their kids, before prom.
Lisa Stretton started a Facebook group last year, “Westport Moms: Embracingthe Empty Nest,” as a resource for those newly initiated into the fray. “We’re not old enough for the Senior center, there’s really no place for us,” she says. Her page offers entertainment and connection — a welcome diversion from an empty home.
While it stings for almost everyone, stay-at-home moms and single parents seem to feel it more acutely.
A widower admits, “I lost my wife, then my kids went to college. Now I have to reinvent myself.”
A single mother writes of her daughter: “All those years of having her to care for, and then nothing. My purpose was gone. I had a little bit of a breakdown and wanted to die a bit.”
Lila Greifenberger and her roommate, at Indiana University.
Alison Dorfman, founder of The College & Dorm Corner, recently posted a message that went viral: “College drop-off season: when fully functioning adults start crying in completely inappropriate places.”
As for me, a single and, more or less, stay-at-home mom, I feel anxious and untethered. But writing this article has helped keep me busy and focused on something other than my kids.
Which, of course, is the point.
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