Member-only story
An Empty Nest, Sooner Than Expected
With our son out of the house, my husband and I provide our own teenage ambience
My son, completely at wits’ end with Zoom education, left for boarding school last month, so my husband and I became, a few years ahead of schedule, empty nesters. I had not yet given this phase of my life much thought; my son is in 10th grade, so I had assumed I had three more years of hands-on parenting. My thoughts about empty nesting were formed primarily by a television commercial that ran some years back, in which parents are sending their kid off to college, accompanied by the weeping of huge crocodile tears and the wringing of hands, but the minute the kid leaves, they race into his room, pitch out all his furniture, rip down his heavy-metal posters, and turn the room into some kind of fancy, expensive spa/home theater.
I never pictured myself celebrating at all — in fact, I looked at the prospect of his departure with real dread — but I also figured there might be changes we’d appreciate. For instance, our trash would no longer bulge with uncountable numbers of pizza boxes; our travel plans could be made without regard to a school calendar; there would be less stinky laundry to do. More than that, though, I thought my husband and I would start living an adult-centric life. We would watch higher-brow movies that my…
