And just like that, you are new people with new roles and responsibilities and new opportunities.
My husband is in the living room watching the first Texas game of the season. He woke up bright and early, like a kid heading off to Disneyland. (Or me, not gonna lie.) He went to bed early so that he got a good night’s sleep and went to the store yesterday to prep for GAME DAY. I am in bed, writing, sipping coffee, and trying to grow my dogs’ TikTok account so they can start paying the bills instead of us. This is all actually pretty normal, except it is the first Longhorn game that he has watched since his gameday buddy went to college. Of course, he and his son didn’t watch every single game together, but our kiddo was always just on the other side of town instead of here, and now he is in a whole different state. It’s an emotional day in this house.
But it all seemed to happen so quickly. When my husband and I started dating, his son was six. Barely. And at the time, it seemed like it would take a thousand years until he would graduate high school, and all of a sudden, off he went. He’s been in Arkansas now for several weeks, and I thought it would be weirder than it is, and it’s just… normal. I don’t know how better to explain it. Maybe it is because he split his time between here and his mom’s, and it still just feels like he’s over there. Maybe in another few weeks, it will feel like, man, we haven’t seen this kiddo in a long time. But it is strange how much time you spend preparing them for that one, singular moment: the moment you drop them off at school, with their own address instead of yours. If they don’t go to school, it’s that same moment that you get them moved into their first apartment. Roughly eighteen years leading up to a single day, and after that day, you are different.
You aren’t parents in the same way anymore; you are empty nesters. The way you shop changes, the way you share time with your partner changes. The way you think about the future changes, and the way you think about the day-to-day changes. Everyone has a new, evolved role in each other’s lives. And its… cool. I like it. It is a learning process- growth, I guess, to figure out where these new puzzle pieces fit into everything but it’s fun. We stayed in Austin to give our kid a stable home and education, and now we can actually fantasize about starting a new chapter in a new town- preferably one with moderate weather and beaches. We don’t need the big house. We don’t need to buy lunch snacks. We don’t even need to prepare actual meals anymore if we don’t want to. But not only that, it’s letting go of making sure the homework is done, the alarm is set, of checking to see if he is almost home from hanging out with his friends. Being an empty nester is an absolute trust fall- for everyone. We need to trust that we need everything we could to prepare him for this new chapter, and he needs to trust himself to navigate the world without us. And so far, I feel like we are all doing a good job, and we’ve done just about everything right.
The amount of checking in he does with us seems just right. It’s not daily. And I think that is the way it should be. That tells me he is doing OK. That tells me that we have amply prepared him for this phase of life, and that he has self-confidence and self-assuredness to stake his claim as a young adult in this world, with his own identity. We don’t check in on him daily, and that tells me that we have prepared ourselves for this, and are able to respect his time, his autonomy, and his decisions. It feels, overall, like a healthy launch.
And then there is us. Learning how to fill our evenings in a different way, our weekends. Where we (and when I say we, I mean Nathan) cooked dinner for a family, now there are two people content with nibbling, but needing to re-prioritize each other. Where we spent nights together as a family, needing to be careful not to get too caught up in our own things now that there are just the two of us. Where we spent the last year really preparing our son for college, and letting him be the main focus, now making each other the main focus. It is very easy to say, OK, now let’s grind, let’s focus on our hobbies or goals because we got our boy to college, so we need to make sure that we don’t lose sight of each other. Every day is a new opportunity to explore this new version of ourselves as individuals, as partners, and as long-distance parents that have taken a step back from parenting, and are now in our “advisor” roles, if you will.
It takes so long to get here, and then in one single day, everything changes. You are new people. The same, but new. A new husband. A new wife. Parents of a college student instead of a high schooler. A man watching Texas football with his dogs dressed up in UT garb, instead of his son- but texting updates along the way, keeping that bond nice and supple. A woman writing books after back-to-back foot surgeries. People stepping into a new chapter.
We talk a lot about kids spreading their wings and leaving- the parents left behind in the empty nest. But maybe we’ve been looking at it wrong all along- maybe the nest is empty because we all learn to fly at the same time.
A nice read Morgan