I didn’t expect either of my kids to come home for fall break, but after spending two days visiting her brother, my daughter came home for 48 hours. I was exhausted when she arrived. I had spent much of the weekend staying up too late working on a video for my mom’s 75th birthday, and by Sunday night, I had very little left to give.
As it turned out, I didn’t need to give much of anything.
I did my normal batch cooking for the week and included a recipe for my daughter so she would have something she liked to eat when she arrived Sunday night. That was about the only effort I made. She saw her friends, handled her own meals, and mostly did her own thing. Instead of needing something from me, she gave me something: her presence. She brought a light into the house simply by being there.
On her last night home, the three of us weren’t even together. She was in her room. My husband was downstairs. I was sitting in bed listening to podcasts, desperately trying to stay awake. I was exhausted, but I fought sleep because I knew it was the last night I would feel her presence. Eventually, I gave myself permission to go to bed and walked down the hall to say goodnight and goodbye, since she wouldn’t be awake when I left for work in the morning. Sometime later, my husband did the same thing. He told me afterward that he missed her almost as soon as he said goodnight.
In the morning, I quietly kissed her head while she slept and left for work. As I pulled out of the garage, I glanced up at the window above me and felt a hole grow in my stomach. I knew immediately what it was. I missed her already.
I hadn’t expected that.
Last year, fall break was probably the hardest part of our transition to empty nesting. We were lucky to have both kids home the same weekend, and yet I found myself nearly in tears almost from the moment they arrived. I had a countdown running in my head: Four days. Three days. Two days. One. They had changed so much in just a few short weeks at college, and I wanted more time to get to know these new adults in my family.
This year, I thought I was doing much better. The fall semester send-off was surprisingly easy. As much as I loved having them home for the summer, their presence changed the rhythm of the house in a way that no longer felt typical. When they left, the quiet felt normal, even refreshing. It was the same kind of quiet I feel when my husband travels: the house was mine, without consequence or responsibility. I could eat when I wanted, watch what I wanted, and shop only when I absolutely had to.
This fall I started thinking more intentionally about what to do with the space that had reopened in my life. I joined a choir. I signed up for yoga. I started asking not just how I would fill my time, but how I wanted to fill it. I thought I was getting the hang of the empty nest. Maybe that’s why the hole in my stomach surprised me so much.
I wasn’t mourning the life I used to have. I wasn’t wishing my daughter still needed me the way she once did. In fact, one of the things I loved most about those 48 hours was that she didn’t. Her presence was enough. Chatting with her, being aware in the background that she was out of the house–visiting one friend, having coffee with another, grabbing something at the grocery store–disrupted the routine my husband and I have been building, in a good way.
Then she left, and I went back to that routine. When I came home that night, the house didn’t feel dramatically different. I had already adjusted to her absence. I just missed her, and I am learning that those two things can coexist.
I can like the life I am building and still wish she were here. I can enjoy the freedom of having no one else to worry about and still feel a real sense of loss when she leaves. I can be ready for my children to live their own lives and still love the particular light they bring into mine when they come home.
I can also still be part of their lives when they aren’t here. My daughter and I talk almost every day. We text. She FaceTimes. My son calls and texts too, often while he’s walking across campus or just filling a few minutes. I feel very much a part of their lives, and I know how fortunate that is.
My parents didn’t have that when I went to college. There was no FaceTime on the walk across campus, no quick text about something ridiculous that had just happened, no constant exchange of the tiny details that make up a life, and certainly no “TwinLife” group chat where sarcasm runs freely. My mother was beginning this same stage of parenting with far less to hold on to.
Having just spent the weekend gathering pieces of her life into a single story, I found myself seeing this transition on a much longer timeline. Seeing 75 years laid out that way made me realize something I had never really considered: more than a third of my mother’s life has been spent parenting adult children. She is more than a quarter century into the stage I am just beginning, doing what I described in her birthday video as continuing to create a family. A family of adult children is different from one where your children rely on you for everything, but it takes no less chutzpah, or momming.
Maybe that’s why fall break hits the way it does, even in a good year. It’s the moment each fall when I feel the shape of our family change, the ground shifting a little more toward whatever comes next. They will come home. Sometimes for a summer. Sometimes for a week. Sometimes for 48 hours or less. They won’t need me to take care of them the way they once did. They may not need me to do anything at all. They will just be here.
And then they won’t. And I will miss them.
And that is simply part of loving the family I am still creating.
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