The Impending Empty Nest

What will restabilizing look and feel like when foundational people in our lives go away?

Image/Banyan Mental Health

To be fair, I’m not entirely sure that my situation qualifies.

Maybe when you’re a shitty husband and your wife’s like “I’m done, bitch. Enjoy your Crying Lonely Reject Sandwich,” and then moves out, you don’t get to actually be an empty nester once your children age and eventually stop living with you part time.

The empty nest.

The thing that happens when your children reach a certain age and move out of the house to pursue whatever their adult journey is going to be.

Some of you have already experienced this. Others of you don’t have children. And many of you are in the same boat as me—you have kids at home, and maybe sometimes you think about what your life might look like when they’re not home with us anymore.

The historically common way of thinking about it was what happens to a married couple who raise children together at home, and then experience all of them growing up and moving away. Sometimes, that’s 25-30 years of adapting to a certain way of life, depending on the number of kids and the age gap between them.

What’s left when the kids move out? What do parents—also romantic partners—do once they’re no longer doing the thing they’ve identified with most closely and emotionally for two or three decades?

My young family—my wife and 4-year-old son—were my foundation and the thing around which my entire life revolved a decade ago when we were all still living together. Then, my little man’s mother had her fill of sharing a life with me, made the decision to end our marriage, and everything changed.

One of the most difficult parts of divorce was simply coping psychologically and emotionally with the abrupt and radical life change. Humans often demonstrate resistance to change. We fear the unknown. We fear powerlessness. We fear all kinds of things. So if something is routine and comfortable for us, we often stick with it, even when it’s maybe not so good for us.

But I was feeling it hard when she left. Everything was new and different and awful, and there was nowhere to run or hide from it.

I used to talk about the thick, silent air at home in the newly empty house. Just walking in the door to a house where there had once been life and energy was suddenly a much different experience. At the time, a jarring and painful one. I always said I never knew how loud silence could be.

But, half of the days following the separation and divorce, my handsome little preschooler—now a handsome 15-year-old high school sophomore—would come home with me and remind me why I would always want to wake up tomorrow. I’ve never loved anything like I have that guy.

Of course, clocks and calendars being what they are and doing what they do, the past 10 years have somehow simultaneously slogged and warped by. The divorce is both ancient history and a lifetime ago, but also this big, important, painful, life-altering thing that just happened.

The behavior transition that every parent with teenagers has felt has already begun at home. Even when my son’s home with me, we don’t hang out nearly as much as we used to. I try to not whine about it.

I was a lot like him, and if I had VR gaming headsets and the ability to play games with and talk to my friends all at the same time like these kids do, it’s certainly what I would have wanted to do most of the time.

It’s been a major adjustment this past school year, adapting to a life that has revolved almost entirely around being that boy’s father. And now I suddenly find my rhythm of life to be much different than it was just a year ago.

It’s not lost on me that I’m going to have that same experience again, multiplied by a hundred billion kajillion, when he graduates from high school just three short years from now.

For better or worse, my relationship with my son, and having him at home with me every two or three days off and on over the past decade had evolved into my new foundation. My new anchor. My new normal. The new, steady thing that I adapted to, and relied on mentally and emotionally for life to feel something close to regular and okay.

And the countdown has always been ticking, but I’m really starting to feel it now—wondering what Chapter 3 of adulthood might look and feel like when I no longer have these purpose-giving, safety-providing life anchors anymore. This routine of mine. This precious, fleeting time with a child at home who is rapidly transitioning more into a young man every day.

It scares me a little bit. All of this going away. What do I do now?, I think.

Several coaching clients through the years have reported staying together “for the kids,” and then pretty quickly ending their marriages after their youngest went off to school or wherever life would take them.

I imagine that transition—for someone who didn’t want a divorce—might feel even more gutting and tragic and painful than my experience 10 years ago.

I realize this won’t always be true, but for most of us, every day until the last time, there’s always going to be a tomorrow. There’s always going to be a What do I do now?

In addition to the emotional loss of sending our kids out into the world to experience young adulthood on their own, there’s the logistical void of no longer being wanted or needed for all that we once provided. Meals. Laundry. Transportation. Money. Boundaries. Emotional support. All of the things we did to actively love and care for them as we attempted in our own way to help shape them into the best people they could be.

And suddenly—poof!—no one necessarily wants or needs that from us anymore, at least not to the degree that we had been. And maybe suddenly we find another void in ourselves.

Where we had purpose and meaning before, maybe we have a big new hole in our lives to try to fill up.

But how? What could ever fill such a deep and meaningful void?

Those are questions we’ll all have to find answers to. Certainly, the mettle of our marriages or romantic partnerships will be tested during these times, and many others.

As one or both partners experience a loss of some kind, it will be helpful (if not necessary) for us to try to help them fill those voids. To try to help soothe those pains. And if that proves impossible—to at the very least, sit with them in the discomfort (literally or metaphorically) so that they’re not going through it alone.

Love hard, everyone. Love so, so hard.

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Matthew Fray is the author of “This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships”, a relationship coach, and formerly the blogger at Must Be This Tall To Ride.