The Empty Nest Is a Long Ride

What nobody tells you about the year after they go.

I’ve heard guys on the course say it. “Man, we finally got the last one out.”

They mean it, too. There’s relief in it, and freedom, and a little bragging. For plenty of people that’s the honest experience and there’s nothing wrong with it. Not every family is built the same way and not every parent grieves this.

Ours wasn’t like that.

We were close. Loud house, everybody in everybody’s business, the four of us tangled up in each other’s schedules for two decades. And somewhere in there I think I quietly assumed it would just keep going. Not consciously. You don’t sit down and decide that. You just live inside something that has always been true and never picture the version where it isn’t.

My son is finishing a PhD out of state. My daughter moved away last year for a job with an NBA team. My wife and I are officially empty nesters.

And here’s what I want to be clear about, because I think people get this wrong when they write about it. Life is good. The kids are off doing exactly what we raised them to go do. My marriage is good. Nothing is wrong.

It’s just different. And it takes getting used to. And a piece of you is gone in a way that’s hard to put into words.

Both of those are true at once.

Nobody tells you it comes in stages.

I thought this was one event. It isn’t. It’s a long ride with a lot of stops.

The first one leaves for college and that’s brutal, but he comes home. Thanksgiving, Christmas, all summer. His room is exactly how he left it. You’re sad, but there’s a countdown running in the back of your head.

Then the second one goes. Now the house is quiet during the school year, but it refills. There are still two rooms in there waiting.

Then one graduates and goes out into the actual world, with an apartment and a job and a life, and he isn’t coming back for the summer. But you’ve still got one in college, so there’s still a rhythm. There’s still a semester ending somewhere. And then the last one goes. And the rooms are just rooms.

That’s the one nobody warns you about. Not the first drop-off with the extra long twin sheets and the crying in the car. The later one, the quiet one, when you understand that the countdown you’d been running for six years has stopped and there’s nothing at the end of it.

We actually moved. Downsized a few years back, partly because my wife said she felt like there were ghosts running through that house. She wasn’t being dramatic. It was a family home with no family in it. Every hallway had a version of them in it that didn’t exist anymore.

So you make changes. You transition. You do the reasonable adult things. But, when you genuinely loved being a parent, when it filled your heart and it was the best thing you ever did, there’s no clean replacement for that. You don’t just swap it out. That’s life. I don’t have a tidy answer for it. We’re still figuring ours out.

What I actually miss isn’t the big stuff…it’s the ordinary stuff

Playing them music and watching to see what landed. Showing them movies I loved at their age and waiting for the part where I knew they’d laugh. Taking them to see amazing concerts. Teaching them to ride bikes and introducing them to sports. Talking about life, randomly and in depth. Watching them excel at school and athletics was an honor and a privilege. And the laughing. We laughed a lot in that house. That’s what I miss. Not the events. The presence. The fact that they were simply around.

And here’s the part I hold onto. I want them to have this someday. Because it is genuinely the best thing I’ve ever done, and I’d like them to know what that feels like from the inside.

My wife and I have been through all these feelings. Long walks where we talk it through. Conversations that start over dinner and run past the dishes. Slowly, and I do mean slowly, acceptance turns up. Then some hope after it. You start to feel like you’re getting your feet under you. And then Facebook hands you a photograph and drags you right back in. You open your phone at seven in the morning to check the weather and there’s your daughter at eight years old, absolutely certain she’s going to the Olympics. Some mornings that wrecks you. It’s a picture of a place that doesn’t exist anymore and can’t be visited. And some mornings it’s the best thing that happens all day.

That’s the part I didn’t expect. It isn’t only painful. Sometimes it’s genuinely wonderful to remember, and the same photo can do either thing depending on the week you’re having. There’s no predicting which one you’re going to get. The kids aren’t gone. They’re thriving, which was the whole point. But the eight-year-old in that picture is gone permanently, and nobody gave you the chance to say goodbye to her, because she left one Tuesday at a time over about fifteen years.

Right as the kids were heading off to school, we lost the family dog, Chewy. Terrible timing, if there’s good timing for that. The house was already emptying out and then the dog who’d been in every one of those years went too. So I found a puppy. Fast. Partly because I couldn’t stand the idea of my wife absorbing all three losses at once, and partly because I wanted something new and alive in her days that wasn’t just me. That’s Rosie. She’s a cavapoo, and my wife dotes on her exactly the way she doted on the kids, and watching that has been one of the better things about this whole stretch. People say pick a partner who’ll be a good mother to your kids. I won that lottery, and I’m getting to watch her do it again.

What you fill it with

Golf. Vinyl. Biking, reading, the gym. I joined leagues. Concerts, movies, dinner with friends. Travel, long walks with my wife. All of it good. All of it genuinely enjoyable. And here’s the honest part. I don’t ever remember talking with my wife, while it was all happening, about someday needing to find something to replace it. That’s the piece you have to come to grips with. Not that the new things aren’t good, because they are. It’s that you spent two decades inside something you never imagined needing a substitute for.

They’re where they’re supposed to be

You certainly don’t want them sitting on your couch at thirty. You raised them to leave. That was the assignment, and if they’ve gone, you did it right. They’re where they’re supposed to be. And we’re where we’re supposed to be. It’s taken some time. But it’s starting to feel like this next phase could be something just as good. Different shape, fewer people, more room. Everybody’s version of this is their own. The guy on the course who’s thrilled isn’t wrong, and neither are you if you’re sitting in a quiet kitchen wondering what happened. Ours is still developing.

What I’d tell you if you were sitting across from me

I’m a marriage and family therapist, so let me say the useful part out loud. This transition has a name, and it isn’t depression. Pauline Boss calls it ambiguous loss, which is grief for someone physically gone but psychologically completely present. It’s confusing precisely because nobody died and nothing went wrong. There’s no ritual for it, no casserole, no card. That doesn’t mean you aren’t grieving something real. The research is more hopeful than you’d expect. Berkeley followed a group of women for eighteen years, into their sixties, and marital satisfaction went up after the kids left. But not because those couples had more time together. It went up because they enjoyed the time more.

That distinction matters. More hours in the same house fixes nothing on its own. If the two of you are sitting in a quiet living room looking at separate phones, you have all the time and none of the thing that actually helps. The couples who do well in this phase go looking for each other again on purpose. That’s the work. It doesn’t happen by default, and it’s a lot easier to start now than after five years of politely coexisting.

One more thing, since you made it this far

When somebody finally says the hard thing out loud, that they’re struggling, that their marriage has gotten quiet, that they don’t recognize their life since the kids left, the person they say it to is almost never a therapist. It’s a friend. A sister. Somebody standing in a kitchen who wants very badly to help and has no idea what to say past “you should probably talk to someone. That’s how most people actually end up in my office. Not a search. Somebody who cared about them and knew where to point.

So now you know where to point

I’m Mark. I’m a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Carmel, and I work with individuals and couples around Carmel, Fishers, Noblesville, and Indianapolis on anxiety, burnout, life transitions, empty nesting, and the slow quiet drift that shows up in perfectly good marriages when nobody’s paying attention.

If this sounded like you, or like somebody you love, it’s worth taking seriously before it hardens into something permanent.

Schedule a consultation at dubectherapy.com

Mark Dubec, MA, LMFT, is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Carmel, Indiana. He’s trained in the Gottman Method and certified in SYMBIS premarital facilitation. Before becoming a therapist he spent his career in television and the corporate world. He lives in Carmel with his wife and a cavapoo named Rosie.