Filling Time: TwinLife Empty-Nesting

College students, it turns out, are not all that different from babies. They sleep. They eat. They play. Seeing my kids fall into that pattern over their semester break reminded me of early TwinLife, before things got activity-busy. My kids’ lives were organized around very basic needs; my husband and I had to adjust to their rhythms.

The difference this time (aside from the fact I didn’t have to change any diapers) was that I was not the rule maker. Rather, I had stepped fully into the role of mentor – watching, listening, sometimes nudging, but mostly trusting them to create their own rules and make their own decisions. That shift has been happening gradually over the past year, accelerating after graduation, and becoming unmistakably real when they went off to college. People have told me that it can be tense when the kids come home – they want the freedom they have had in the dorms yet parents expect them to follow the rules of the house. Over this first semester break, I tried really hard to minimize the tension, choosing to see my kids as emerging adults who needed a mentor more than a task master.

Mentoring was on my mind quite a bit last week as I prepared for the semester. I spent much of the week designing and testing an AI agent—an Ikigai coach to help students think through their sense of purpose: what they’re good at, what they love, how they can contribute to the world, and how they might make a living doing so. Part of my task in designing the new college at my university is to rethink the role of a faculty member. If knowledge can be accessed anytime, anyplace, then the proverbial “sage,” a faculty member who is an expert in a particular (slice of a) discipline, is not as important as a guide who can help students curate the knowledge and skills they need to reach their goals in life. The role feels far less like designing traditional instruction and much more like mentoring—helping students design their own pathways rather than handing them a predetermined one.

As part of preparing for the semester, I was also getting a physical space ready for the first cohort of students in the new college. The small building had previously been used as administrative office space. It had been emptied, but not yet transformed into a learning environment. My students and I will be tackling the design of the space together, but in an effort to spend some meaningful time with my daughter before she headed back to school, I asked her to go to the thrift store.

As we walked in, joking and bantering, she asked, “So what are we shopping for?” I hadn’t fully articulated it until that moment. “I’m looking for things to inspire the design of my new space at the college,” I said. “Let’s see what speaks to us.”

Almost immediately, I spotted a monkey jar. We both loved it. Seriously, we were cooing over its cuteness. We wandered the store, but I kept circling back to that jar, imagining it filled with candy. It was playful; it had character; it was an invitation to think a little differently, to be a little different. Then my daughter noticed a sign sitting high on a shelf that simply read: THINK. She said, “This feels like the space you and your students are going to create.” She was right.

Before we left, I found a coffee urn. I make a lot of coffee for gatherings and events, and it felt practical and symbolic all at once. I walked out of the store with three things: a monkey jar, a sign that says THINK, and a coffee urn—the beginnings of a space designed not just for work, but for connection. I’m reframing my learning space as one of connections, where my team of learners can show up as they are and chart their own paths.

This is a complete reframing of how traditional college courses operate. While many faculty invite their students to connect and to think, the overwhelming majority of the work is driven by syllabus expectations, not by the students’ passions, interests, and personal life goals. Reframing puts students truly at the center – and I’m hoping they take my invitation to monkey around a bit on our path of learning to think.

I had some more quality time with my daughter as I drove her back to school, stopping at my parents’ house to visit along the way. While we were chatting, their cat was sleeping nearby, purring so loudly it filled the room. I commented that since it was asleep, it wasn’t really purring; it was snoring. We joked that human snoring wasn’t as tolerable, and I suggested that maybe if I reframed my husband’s snoring as purring, I would find it more tolerable. The irony, of course, is that my husband hates cats, so we had a good laugh–which woke up the cat!

The idea stuck with me through the weekend–not seeing my husband as purring (though I still find it hilarious) but of reframing what we know so that we can imagine a different experience or future. Perhaps this is why it was a little easier this time to step back into the empty nest as both my children headed back to college. Reframing my “kids” as “adults” helps our relationship grow into the next phase and makes it easier to let them go each time they take another step down their own path. There’s a lot of reframing happening in my life right now. And I’m excited to see where my path is headed.