Empty Nesters - How long did it take to find your new normal?

[Jenny in Florida]

I considered posting this on the college board, but I figured there might be some folks here who aren't on that board for some reason.

 

My daughter went to college young, then came home for a couple of years, working and saving up a nest egg for herself. She made her big move to New York this past June. Then my son decided to graduate from high school a year earlier than I had planned and moved into his dorm in August. He's only 90 minutes away. We see him a couple of times a month and talk to him a few times a week. My daughter calls home every two or three days, at the least, and we text or Facebook message at least daily.

 

Nonetheless, I'm having a tough couple of weeks. Honestly, I knew I would miss them, but I really thought I would adjust fairly quickly. I think of myself as a pretty resilient person, and I'm doing most of the things I see listed as suggestions for coping. I am working 25-30 hours a week, volunteering once a week, have found a new church I like and am looking for ways to get more involved there. I'm taking care of myself, walking with the dog more, making a point of seeing friends, etc.

 

But I seem to be feeling worse, not better, as the months pass.

 

I'm an introvert and crave time alone. Yet nowadays, every time I'm home by myself for more than a couple of hours, I start feeling more and more down.

 

So, those of you who have been through this, how long did it take for you to make the transition, to feel like life was normal again, like you weren't just passing time until the next time you got to see or speak with your kids?

[Alicia64]

(((Jenny))) No advice. Just tears. I'm so sorry.

 

My best friend's daughter went 3,000 mi. away to school last year (at 17) and it sure sounded/sounds rough.

 

I highly, highly recommend Lisa Scottoline's non-fiction books about her only daughter going away to school. Lisa is divorced so when her daughter moved, Lisa was left with dogs and cats. I can't tell you how funny her four books are. Just fantastic.

 

The first: My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just has More closet Space

 

Her second one was: The Third Husband Will Be a Dog.

 

Third: Meet Me at Emotional Baggage.

 

Seriously, these books are really funny and help put the empty nest situation into a better perspective.

 

I hope you'll let me know if you read them!

 

Alley

 

 

[Susan C.]

:grouphug:

 

Mine are still here, job challenges, local college student (and work at home husband). So the quiet after 17 years of homeschooling never happened. I look at your posts mentioning an alone vacation maybe with a little envy... The truth is, for us, probably somewhere in the middle of no kids and kids all the time would work best.

 

Have you thought about using the vacation to visit your daughter in NY if its a good time for her? It might soothe that empty spot, I'm sure you miss her terribly. And then go get a room near your son and take him out to several meals over the weekend too (he'll appreciate good food over that cafeteria stuff). I'll be honest, I'm dreading mine leaving and probably won't do as well as you are...  I'll be checking back to see hive wisdom on this.

[Deb in NZ]

We're in almost that situation at the moment.  Ds#1 is still living at home, but is not home much due to working long hours & when he is he is usually in his room.  Dd hasn't been home full-time for the past 5 years.  When she moved away for uni life actually got a bit less stressful as I only had 2dc to cart around to activities & we still were HS/ing the boys.  Over the Christmas holidays this year ds#2 decided to take up a hockey scholarship to a school 10 hours south of here.  It was a whirlwind 3 weeks to get things ready & get him settled in his new school.  Returning home with dh to an almost empty nest was surprisingly hard.  Dh has yet to adjust.  We expected ds#2 to move away in 2016 for uni or apprenticeship as he needed to go where the hockey was more competitive to follow his dreams.  The fact that it has happened a year early has really thrown us.  

 

What I found the hardest was filling in my diary (planner) & our family calendar.  For the past 15 years my life has revolved around our dc's activities & I am lost without that framework.  Slowly I am finding the joy in rediscovering dh & I as a couple as well as beginning to look at doing things just for me.  I'm hoping that things get easier as time goes by.

 

 

[regentrude]

Listening in.

I am not quite there yet, since only DD has left for college, but since DS is an introvert who wants minimal parental involvement in schooling and has plans for his free time, it is pretty close to empty nest (I still have to provide taxi service and huge meals, but that's it).

I have been anticipating this being difficult and did take on a huge project at work before last summer, because I thought being busy would keep me from missing DD. Alas, that is not really working, and I still find myself with way too much time on my hand, despite working a lot. I added a few hours of an extra job. I try to spend time on self education. I spend more time with DH. Some days I'm fine- and others, I am not. So all I know is that it will take more time than just half a year to find the new normal.

[Ellie]

I considered posting this on the college board, but I figured there might be some folks here who aren't on that board for some reason.

 

My daughter went to college young, then came home for a couple of years, working and saving up a nest egg for herself. She made her big move to New York this past June. Then my son decided to graduate from high school a year earlier than I had planned and moved into his dorm in August. He's only 90 minutes away. We see him a couple of times a month and talk to him a few times a week. My daughter calls home every two or three days, at the least, and we text or Facebook message at least daily.

 

Nonetheless, I'm having a tough couple of weeks. Honestly, I knew I would miss them, but I really thought I would adjust fairly quickly. I think of myself as a pretty resilient person, and I'm doing most of the things I see listed as suggestions for coping. I am working 25-30 hours a week, volunteering once a week, have found a new church I like and am looking for ways to get more involved there. I'm taking care of myself, walking with the dog more, making a point of seeing friends, etc.

 

But I seem to be feeling worse, not better, as the months pass.

 

I'm an introvert and crave time alone. Yet nowadays, every time I'm home by myself for more than a couple of hours, I start feeling more and more down.

 

So, those of you who have been through this, how long did it take for you to make the transition, to feel like life was normal again, like you weren't just passing time until the next time you got to see or speak with your kids?

 

:grouphug:

 

 

Hang in there, girlfriend. You were the mother for more than a few months; it will take more than a few months for the new normal to kick in.  I've been an empty-nester for over 20 years now, and there are still some days when I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. :-)

[Carol in Cal.]

I really like it.  I miss my daughter but I'm very happy for her, and I'm sleeping better and the house is more predictable.  I've been gradually doing more side trips out of the area here and there, stuff I couldn't do all that easily before.

 

And I would say that in some ways we have a better relationship than ever.  I can be her biggest cheerleader without having to pick her up at the train station at midnight.  We only talk about good stuff now, pretty much.  It's nice.  It does help that she came home for 6 weeks over winter break, and will be back for the summer at the end of May.  I suspect that this will be a lot harder when she finishes college and moves out completely.

[Tammyla]

:grouphug: Mine are still here, but I'm already a little unsettled imagining it.  My understanding is it takes time, and usually more than you think.

[Starr]

:grouphug:  :grouphug:  :grouphug:  It's never the same. I think we are meant to live in our tribe and be with our people. 

[Nan in Mass]

Hugs, Jenny.  Sometimes I still have my kids around and sometimes not.  The not is very strange.  Sometimes it is ok and sometimes I just sort of wander around.  I'm doing all the right things, too, and it would be hard to call me an empty nester, under our circumstances, but I no longer have CHILDREN living at home with me.  I have adult people who used to be my children.  It isn't the same thing.  Ãt's been a year and a half now, for me, and I guess I'm used to things the way they are now, but it doesn't mean I'm happy about it.  I think the problem is that our child is gone and we haven't seen enough of the new person they suddenly became when they went off to college to find that relationship satisfying yet.  I can tell you that when oldest is gone, I miss the man he is now, not the child he used to be, whereas when youngest is away (and even when he is here), I miss the person he used to be several years ago.  Middle one is somewhere in between.  So I guess eventually, you get used to it.  I'm doing lots of things that I like now.  I'm doing everything right, too.  And I managed to overlap the new things with the old things so there weren't any sudden shifts.  I guess it is just going to take awhile.

 

Nan

[Jenny in Florida]

:grouphug:

 

Mine are still here, job challenges, local college student (and work at home husband). So the quiet after 17 years of homeschooling never happened. I look at your posts mentioning an alone vacation maybe with a little envy... The truth is, for us, probably somewhere in the middle of no kids and kids all the time would work best.

 

Have you thought about using the vacation to visit your daughter in NY if its a good time for her? It might soothe that empty spot, I'm sure you miss her terribly. And then go get a room near your son and take him out to several meals over the weekend too (he'll appreciate good food over that cafeteria stuff). I'll be honest, I'm dreading mine leaving and probably won't do as well as you are...  I'll be checking back to see hive wisdom on this.

 

Oh, the alone vacation thing was mostly a fantasy. And then we started getting the bills from my most recent hospital adventure, which pretty much relegated the idea to impossible dream status.

[KatieJ]

My empty nest happened slowly. I was already a grandmother to 5 when my last son got married and left home. I was more than ready to have my house to myself. Seriously there as no adjustment then. The morning of the wedding when he walked out the door ahead of us, that was hard. But come Monday morning I was celebrating an empty house and with a full cup of coffee.

 

 

 

The bigger adjustment for me was when my two sons went to highschool as high schoolers. I was home alone for the first time since my first daughter was born and she was 27 at the time. That took a long while, probably that whole first school year.

[lllll]

:grouphug:

[Jenny in Florida]

I really like it.  I miss my daughter but I'm very happy for her, and I'm sleeping better and the house is more predictable.  I've been gradually doing more side trips out of the area here and there, stuff I couldn't do all that easily before.

 

And I would say that in some ways we have a better relationship than ever.  I can be her biggest cheerleader without having to pick her up at the train station at midnight.  We only talk about good stuff now, pretty much.  It's nice.  It does help that she came home for 6 weeks over winter break, and will be back for the summer at the end of May.  I suspect that this will be a lot harder when she finishes college and moves out completely.

 

Sleeping would be nice. I'm not doing as much of that as I would like. My work schedule is erratic, which means it's tough to maintain a routine, and I'm sure that is contributing to my trouble establishing a sleep schedule. And, dollars to doughnuts, if I do try to steal a couple of extra hours, something happens to wake me. (A couple of weeks ago, it was my son calling me at 11:30 to ask, in a panic, if I had paid his housing deposit for next year. This past weekend, he texted me at 6:00 a.m. to let me know about a change in his schedule. About every two days, one of our cats gets into a loud "discussion" at our front window with the cat next door, who wanders the neighborhood. These interactions happen most often in the early morning or late night and involve loud vocalizing and a lot of scrabbling at the window. This inevitably upsets my dog, who then starts growling and scratching at the sides of her crate, which is next to my bed.)

 

My work schedule is a limitation on fun stuff, too. I don't get my schedule for the week beginning on Monday until sometime late on Thursday. And I can be scheduled to work any time from 9:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. Monday through Thursday. So, it's difficult to make plans. I've had to pass on three events I wanted to attend in just the last month, because I ended up working on those evenings. In fact, I was scheduled to attend a lunchtime enrichment session hosted by the organization with which I volunteer tomorrow afternoon, but I had to cancel because I got scheduled to work in the morning. In some ways, my discretionary time feels more restricted now than it did when I was spending all those hours ferrying teens all over town. 

 

I'm still getting all the bad stuff from both of my kids along with the good stuff. My daughter always says that when anything good happens, she calls me. When anything bad happens, she calls me. When she's bored, she calls me. I fully expected that I wouldn't hear from my son once he was away at school unless he needed money, but he's following his sister's pattern much more closely than I anticipated. I'm glad they continue to share all of it with me, although I will admit it's stressful to know when my daughter is sick or upset over a break-up or a bad day at work or stressed about running out of money and to have her too far away for me to help or even just give her a hug.

[Jenny in Florida]

Still working on it.  And coming to realize I may never have a true 'normal' again.  The rest of my life will probably just be one transition after another.  I guess I'll just cry, grieve, and keep going, like I've been doing for the past year and a half.  Not much else I can do, I don't think.  No desire to take vacations, get jobs, or any other things just for the sake of staying busy.  I talk to the kids (phone and email) every day.  It helps that they're all doing so well.  Beyond that, I don't plan much.  Just taking one day at a time. 

 

:grouphug:

 

I'm sorry you're struggling, too.

 

Honestly, I have never been good at not being busy and would probably find things to do in any case. However, we do really need the money I earn, even though it's not a lot. Between my two part-time jobs, I make enough most months to cover the portion of my son's tuition that isn't taken care of by scholarships and such. For the first time in -- Let's see -- about as long as we've had kids, we are finally, slowly starting to pay down some debt in tiny dribs and drabs. 

 

But busy is good for me, too.

 

I think part of the problem is that I am a planner. For so many years, I always had something on the back burner to research and plan. Even over the last year, we had my son's college search, applications, auditions, followed by his graduation/going away party, then the process of shopping and packing and moving him into the dorm . . . Meanwhile, I was polishing up my resume and looking for a job . . . 

 

And then everything was over, and I settled into just trudging through one week after another. There's nothing interesting on the horizon to plan. I don't need to think about curricula or schedule extracurricular activities. The only things on the "family" calendar are my work and volunteer commitments and which nights my husband meets with his role playing gaming group. 

 

It's just boring and quiet and sad.

[lllll]

..

[Nan in Mass]

Oh, I understand that busy is good.  Especially if you enjoy those things.  :)  I wasn't saying you shouldn't be doing what you're doing.

 

I guess I was thinking of the everlasting, never-ending question which I think I've been asked a minimum of 100 times by everyone from my dh to my kids to my dil to people I've just met ......  "But what will you DO now that all your kids are gone?!?"    Or "But what do you DO all day!?!"  As if I have to DO something to justify my existence now that my kids are gone.  I can't just be me and take my time finding my new 'inspiration' for the next 'big thing' I want to do.  Nooooo, I must be DOING something.  And doing it NOW, by golly!  :rolleyes:  Sorry.  Can you tell I'm frustrated with some people?  ;)  :)

 

Anyway, I get what you're saying about being a planner.  I miss that part of hs'ing, too. 

 

Another thing I realized was something about our culture.  In my grandparents generation, and my parents, to some extent, when they reached my age and their kids didn't need them quite so much, because everybody stayed put, there were always other relatives around who could use their help.  So even though my grandparents lived alone (and one gm worked until she was 65yo), they had lives full of people - some they helped and others who helped them when they needed it - or even just people around to do anything with or talk to.  I think that's one of the things missing for people my age who have lived a somewhat nomadic lifestyle.  No roots.  Oh well.  It does get better, just so you know.     

 

Laughing over the doing something part.  I'm telling people I'm learning to paint.  That quiets them right down.  And it's true.  But it wouldn't have to be.  I get really blank looks when I tell them I'm not getting a job and hope I never have to.  Unless, of course, they are older.  Then I get waves of approval and relief that somebody "younger" understands that even without children or a job, one can be a busy, contributing member of the community.

 

Your last paragraph is what has happened to me.  I spend a good bit of my time with the elders in my extended family, and two days a week I have my nephew while his mother works.  Just about the time that goes away, I'll have grandchildren, and it looks like there is a good chance at least one set will be nearby and what do you bet I wind up doing some of the minding...  It feels rather overwhelming when I think ahead, especially since I'm still kind of reeling from the last batch of changes, so I don't.

 

Not that that helps you at all, Jenny.  I think you should look for a job that requires you to plan the same way you planned for homeschooling, since you found that satisfying.  Transitions are really hard, especially when they involve a certain amount of unknown stuff, like an unknown future job.  My only concrete suggestion for your alone-at-home problem is to put on super cheerful music and try to plug your way through some sort of to-do list.  Or remember that quote from Sword in the Stone, something to the effect that there is nothing so cheering as learning something, and plan something difficult to teach yourself.  Then, whenever there is a down moment, you can tell yourself that you really ought to be studying and go do it.

 

Nan

[creekland]

It didn't take me as long as I expected.  It helps considerably that youngest was rarely home when he was home (before leaving for college) and we are able to indulge in my travel junkie habit.

 

Without those, it'd have taken far, far, longer.

 

I do still enjoy when they are home.  That part hasn't changed a bit.  I actually wish they were still able to travel with us too.  I don't think that will ever change.