That Empty Feeling

Preparing for an empty nest is hard. Living through it is even harder

By Jody Jaffe

There’s a framed photo in our living room that my husband, John Muncie, knows is good for a laugh when we entertain new guests.

We no longer live in Montgomery County, where the first question is: “What do you do?” We moved to the gorgeous Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, so now the first query is always: “What brought you here?”

That’s when John pulls out The Photo. The stained glass frame delicately surrounds a young man, his arm wrapped tightly around a middle-aged woman, both with their eyes squeezed nearly shut. An expansive smile, billboarding $6,000 worth of orthodontia, pushes the young man’s cheeks up, his eyes squinting into thin brown lines. The woman’s face is cracked in grief, her lips and cheeks pulled downward by quivering muscles, her eyes dark and watery slits. You can practically feel the baseball in her throat.

That’s me, saying goodbye to my older son, Ben, when we dropped him off at the University of Chicago four years ago. I’m holding a tissue in my right hand. If you look closely, you can see white knuckles and my fingers locked onto the flimsy material as if it were a lifeline that might keep me afloat until I repeated the separation process three years later with my younger son, Sam.

“Our empty nest,” John offers up the photo as explanation to any new guest. They always laugh. “That’s what brought us here. And she’s still crying.”

My husband—a fellow journalist, so he should know better—has let story trump accuracy. I’m not still crying, at least not like that. I may stand before a few photos of my kids and get misty-eyed, but it’s not the same as being sucker-punched by grief.

“A few photos?” my husband asks with that one-sided eyebrow arch I once found alluring. OK, so there are 68 framed pictures of my kids scattered throughout our house, but that’s down by about a third since we moved into a much smaller place.

And then there’s the wall by the side of our bed that we refer to as “The Shrine.”

Thirteen feet of kid memorabilia and photos. A second-grade painting by Sam entitled, “My Family Skiing and Waching X Files,” hangs next to a program from a Barrie School production of Oklahoma! Ben played Jud. Under that, a bright blue pennant from Yale, where Sam is a sophomore, nudges up to a coaster-size pin that reads: “I’m a proud U of Chicago parent.” Nearby are pictures of Ben and Sam in basketball uniforms, Halloween costumes, graduation gowns and juice-stained footies.  

That’s where John caught me the other day, wiping away a tear. 

"That sounds pretty normal. Weeping before the shrine.” So says novelist Susan Coll, author of Rockville Pike and Acceptance. In the fall, she packed off Max, the last of her three children, to Tulane University. Two days later, the moving truck arrived and she and her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Steve Coll, downsized from a Bethesda colonial to a Cleveland Park semi-detached.

“I wasn’t as focused then on the empty nest as I would have been if we stayed put,” Susan says. “I spent the first month in our new house, almost kind of maniacal. Steve was worried and looked up the definition of clinical mania.”

Mania has its upsides. No moving boxes remain in the Colls’ new Washington, D.C., house, all the rooms are furnished and the pictures are hung. “I was happy in this new phase of life,” she says. “I was really happy, enjoying the rhythm of not having to get up at 6:30.”

But mania also has its downside: “It hit me a month later. I realized how much I missed them,” Susan says. “That began my period of grief. I just felt very sad, because that whole 22-year phase of my life was finished. There were funny ways it would hit me. I’d find myself teary-eyed walking the dog in the morning, seeing mothers getting kids off to school. And Halloween … it was always about accommodating everyone’s costumes, getting everyone out, worrying about where they were, when they came home, all that candy, too much sugar, the dog barking. It always felt like an overwhelming day. To go from that to quiet, I felt very sad. We didn’t even get many trick-or-treaters this year.”

Crying over candy or pictures or the dorm room displays at Target is par for the empty-nest course, it seems. Every parent whose kids have flown the coop has a story to tell. Or to sell.

Amazon lists 6,635 “empty nest” books with titles such as 133 Ways to Avoid Going Cuckoo When the Kids Fly the Nest; Bye, Bye, Birdie … Eve of an Empty Nest; Empty Nest, Empty Life? and my husband’s favorite: Learning to Let Go: When to Say Good-Bye to Your Children.

Much ink has been spilled over this topic. I, alone, am responsible for two empty-nest articles and a soon-to-be-written empty-nest novel I’m co-writing with my buddy, Abby Bardi (author of The Book of Fred and “Sin of the Month” columnist for the Takoma Voice). We’re calling it, They’re Just Not That Into You.

Such attention to empty nesters is to be expected. We baby boomers—and our life transitions—have always provided fodder for the media. We’ve been chronicled every step of the way, from New York Times articles about the burgeoning classrooms of  the 1950s to TIME Magazine covers of drenched hippies at Woodstock. We’ve been dissected, labeled and relabeled: baby boomers, hippies, yippies, yuppies, buppies, abbies, soccer moms, sandwich generationers. Even our children carry our mark. They’re called “echo boomers” and “boomerangs.” So why should this transition—which I would argue is the most challenging yet, at least for me—not be noticed, heralded and profited from?

In this age of new media, TIME covers are no longer the benchmark of importance; it’s how many hits you get on Google. And “empty nest” gets plenty—769,000 links to empty-nest everything. There are empty-nest support groups, empty-nest live chats, empty-nest bulletin boards and even an empty-nest quiz on MSNBC.com to determine your stage of "Mother Launch."

“How did you feel during the first few weeks after your last child left home?” asks the quiz, from Carin Rubenstein’s book, Beyond the Mommy Years. You get four choices: shocked, sad, relieved or happy. I wrote in a fifth: Like my other arm had been cut off. (My first child’s departure took the first arm).

Pathetic, I know, but not over the top, at least compared with the moms who post on the empty-nest bulletin boards. “I cannot stop crying lately. I’m not ready to let her go,” wrote Mary2007.

Mary isn’t the only one. I spoke with a number of Bethesda-area empty nesters in various stages of “Parent Launch.” That’s right, I’m widening the sociological phenomenon beyond “Mother Launch.”

Though the empty-nest syndrome (yes, it’s an actual syndrome) usually hits women harder than men, according to Psychology Today, I know one father who still sobs after his post-college kids’ visits.

“I hate being gender-biased,” says my cousin, Randy Jaffe, a Santa Barbara-based family therapist to the stars. “But it’s usually the person more connected, the primary caretaker, who has the most trouble with it; and most of the time, that’s the mom.”

Though Russell Lacey, a Kensington single father, isn’t the above-mentioned sobbing dad, he did reach for the hankie during orientation at the University of Alabama, where his daughter, Caroline, is a freshman. “I got teary-eyed,” Lacey says. “And she called me a big sap, because I am a big man.”

Caroline lived with her father from age 3. During those years, Lacey says he put his life on hold and even chose a career that would allow him the time to raise a child. “I never thought I’d go into the mortgage business,” he says. “But it gave me the flexibility to be there for my daughter. I never missed one of her parades; when she was in high school at Walter Johnson, they gave me a volunteer award; [when] my daughter did crew, I helped fundraise; I towed the boats on the back of my SUV, picking them up at 5:30 in the morning; I coached her Montgomery County recreational league basketball team .…”

The list went on. But it ended in August, and, for the Laceys, not a minute too soon. Like many of the empty nesters I spoke with, Lacey described the challenges of living with a kid the summer before he or she goes to college. “I was going to backslap her,” he says, echoing what other empty nesters say about that final summer. “As kids get older, they’re pushing the limits. It was time for her to go. Because if you’re in my house, they’re my rules. She was looking for that other set of rules, like who comes over, what time you get in.”

Curfew was also a provocative issue in our house the summers before Ben and Sam left. Fraught negotiations led to long nights of me dozing off and waking up, listening for the car door to slam, usually in the early hours of the next day. All those sleepless nights; it was like having babies again. The tiny part of me that wasn’t panicked about their impending departure looked forward to the return of uninterrupted sleep.

After Caroline left for college, her father quit the mortgage business to start his own company. He’s now an energy consultant, spending most of the time he once used raising Caroline on building his business—and on himself.

“That’s been the biggest change,” Lacey says. “It’s not like I’m a socialite, out partying every night. But I can focus on myself a little more. I’m more active in “The Sergeant’s Program” (an early morning workout group) and I’m doing a little more serious dating. The first week, I probably went out more nights than I have in years.”

Lacey misses his daughter, but it’s not the overriding emotion. “It was great having her around,” he says, “but I’m really more excited for her to be grabbing all those new opportunities.”

Silver Spring pediatrician Ellie Hamburger has feelings similar to Lacey’s. And that, she says, was the biggest surprise of her empty-nest transition. Her daughter, Lily, 22, was set to graduate from Middlebury College in February, and her son, Ben, 19, is a sophomore at Eckerd College.

“The unexpected part of this whole thing was how wonderful it was to see my kids launch successfully into the next phase of their lives and to be able to leave the nest and feel good about it,” Hamburger says. “Once they got to college, it felt really great knowing they could settle into a more independent life, and they were happy doing so. That was an unanticipated pleasure of parenting.”

For me as well. Much as I moan about how I miss the boys, I couldn’t be prouder of them—or me. They are independent, happy young men taking joyous advantage of the opportunities they’ve created and life has given them. They’re doing well in school, have lots of friends—and usually answer my telephone calls even though both have caller ID.

I’ve always been fast to blame myself for their faults, so it feels good to accept a little of the credit for their successes. That’s when I’m thinking with my brain. It’s thinking with my hormones that quagmires me and other empty nesters.

When Susan Coll, the author, talks about the happiness she feels about her children’s successful launches, she also notices the gap be- tween head and heart. “Fundamentally, I’m very happy they are all off at school and they are happy,” she says. “It’s a huge relief, and it feels like a real sense of accomplishment. Intellectually, I know that this is where they ought to be …”

You know there’s a “but” coming. There’s always a but that snags empty nesters in “The Grief State” of Parent Launch, those moments of sadness when we see little princesses in their Halloween gowns, or find an old soccer jersey at the bottom of a closet or hear a little voice call “Mommy” at the Safeway.

Such moments are not only normal, I’m told, but healthy. Randy Jaffe, the Santa Barbara family therapist, thinks we Americans are stuck in a smiley-faced culture that demonizes sadness. And that, he says, is what’s really unhealthy because sadness can lead to introspection, which can lead to growth. “Fleeting sadness is a normal process of your memories and of honoring history,” Jaffe says. “We’re OK if we feel sad in culturally acceptable ways, like if you pay eight bucks to see a movie, that’s sad.”

But what, he asks, is a more legitimate reason to shed a tear: a sad movie or the end of a profoundly important relationship as you knew it? “You’re honoring the closeness you have and have had,” he says, “and that’s beautiful.” Sometimes that honoring starts early, like when Bethesda nurse practitioner Leslie Wright’s triplets started kindergarten. “I was sad,” says Wright, who lives in Bethesda. “I had to go talk to a therapist about separation anxiety.” So it’s no surprise that her 2004 transition into the empty nest was bumpy. “I was a mess for two months,” she says. “I cried every day, and I’d come home feeling like I had to cook a major meal because I always made sure we ate together.”

But this time she didn’t turn to a therapist for help; instead, she went to a destination spa and came home a vegetarian and exercise enthusiast who could see the benefits of an empty nest. Gone was the scramble to whip up the nightly meat-and-three; her floors were finally free from dirty laundry; and there were new, interesting kinds of talks with her husband.

“I had to learn to reunite with him,” Wright says. “We didn’t have anything to talk about. For 18 years, we’d only talked about them. We had to start talking about us.”

She was happy again. Then came Thanksgiving, when the triplets returned home. “After they came, the house looked like a hurricane hit, and I thought, ‘Why did I miss them?’ For Christmas, they had to bring everything home; three microwaves, three refrigerators, clothes were everywhere. I was so glad when they left. After they leave, it takes me a week to clean up. I still cry a little when they go, but that lasts about 10 minutes.”

Having triplets (or twins or quadruplets) presents a more complicated set of challenges for the launching parent. It’s one fell swoop for everything; not just the separation sadness, but the preparation to get them there (multiply the college visit mania and the agony of the college essays by three) and the financial wallop of paying 12 years of college tuition in four years. Like Wright, Deborah Kelly of Chevy Chase, also a mother of triplets, started the separation process early. “My empty nest began when they boarded the kindergarten bus,” says Kelly, a lawyer at the D.C. firm of Dickstein Shapiro. “I still remember when the bus came to the corner of Thorn- apple and Delfield, “I turned to all the parents and said, ‘The state has them; now it’s just going to be a big blur.’ ”

Which it was for Kelly. The ensuing 12 years lasted about 20 minutes, punctuated by many moments of sad clarity. “When you have triplets, you see everything for the first and last time simultaneously. I was always conscious, maybe pathetically conscious, of ‘this is the last Halloween parade in primary school, the last outdoor education program they’ll go on, the last this, the last that.’ ”

It doesn’t take triplets to get those this-is-the-last-time blues.  I marked many an occasion that way with my boys. The last time I’ll see him in a school play, the last time I’ll see him shoot a foul shot, the last time I’ll wash a uniform, the last time I’ll have to tell him to turn down the television. But unlike Kelly, I was surprised by the arrival of my sons’ senior years.  I wasn’t aware that their childhoods would end. I thought that like my youth, their childhoods would be there forever. And truth be told, isn’t that part of what makes the empty nest so painful? Your youth and those wonderful, innocent days of being absolutely needed are gone.

Kelly says her son Kyle, a freshman at Bard College, likes to joke about her response to the triplets’ departure. “My son will now say, ‘Mom, you cried for a year and a half.’ ” That’s not much of an exaggeration, Kelly says. “The emotional slam of losing them all at once was the second hardest time of having triplets.”

The first was their premature births. Together, they weighed only 7 pounds. “My son was the size of a small hamburger,” Kelly says.

Then came the blur of their childhoods. “I tried to slow down time as much as possible,” she says. “I was unsuccessful. When we went to a meeting for incoming freshmen at [Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School], I sat there and saw all these parents, many of whom I knew from nursery school. I thought I must be in the wrong room.”

Though Kelly’s job with a high-powered law firm is demanding, she always made time to be with her kids, because she was acutely aware of the finite nature of their childhoods. “I missed only one of my daughter’s field hockey games,” she says, “and I went to all their soccer and lacrosse games. I was the starter for the kids’ swim team, the reporter for field hockey.”

On business trips to interesting places, she took one of the triplets. Kendal went to London with her, Kyle to California. “I did whatever I could do to be with them, clearly at the expense of my house, which would never have had a shot at being photographed for Home and Garden,” Kelly jokes.

For me, the most difficult part of the transition was the year before they left. All that time to think, imagine and obsess. The same was true for Kelly. The anticipation, she says, was a killer. Then there were the college tours, three sets of them. “We hit Boston first,” Kelly says. “And sure enough, I’m crying. Not wailing so people had to say, ‘Shut up,’ but crying through all of them.

“I think a lot of us,” Kelly says, “especially in this society, we work hard, we control our lives, [but] you cannot control the fact that your kid is going to college in 18 years, and that’s going to go faster than you can imagine, and you want them to go, you’ve worked for them to go, you’re proud that they’re going. So it comes with celebration and a profound sense of loss and sadness.”

 Kelly eased the blow of her kids leaving by spending what would have been her first weekend alone with a group of women friends. “That Saturday morning, I went off with them and we spent the whole weekend at a place on the lake,” she says. “It was a really smart thing that I left.”

After that, her friends formed an unofficial Kelly-watch. “They were so supportive,” she says. “I had lots of plans and invitations. I made those plans knowing I’d be lonely and I did not want to get into a pity party for myself. That helped me get over the hump. Now I’m in a really good place. I may be deluding myself, but I really do think the anticipation was worse than actually living it.”

As for me, I’m settling here in Shangri-La, living my (almost) dream: 50 acres, five horses, a commanding view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a caring husband who lets me hang 68 pictures of my children throughout the house.

The only part missing? The kids.

Oh yeah, I forgot. They’re not kids anymore.

Jody Jaffe is the author of Shenandoah Summer and Thief of Words, two novels she co-wrote with her husband, John Muncie, under the pseudonum John Jaffe. She teaches journalism at Randolph College. She can be reached at Jodyjaffe@aol.com.