The emptying nest

My younger son has gone to university and my nest is a little bit emptier. I still have my 21-year-old son (who did an apprenticeship after A Levels) and my 16-year-old daughter at home, but I realise I am experiencing a form of grief.

I’m not the first parent to go through this and I certainly won’t be the last. It’s something we all have to experience at some point, as we start to let our grown up children go. And it’s hard!

I wasn’t sure how I would cope. To be honest, I thought it would be a lot easier than it is. I’ve heard about parents crying for weeks before their kids went away and parents sobbing and holding onto their kids as they said goodbye outside their halls. I shed a couple of tears the day before he went away. I’m not big on crying.

But just because I don’t generally cry much, it doesn’t mean I don’t care or feel his loss any less.

My son has everything stacked in his favour, which I thought would make me happy too. He’s at the university he wanted to go to, studying medicine, the subject he wanted to study. The university has an excellent athletics team with a brilliant jumps coach. It isn’t too far from home. One of his best friends from school is living literally downstairs from him.

It couldn’t be better! Yet I am still sad.

The drop-off was vey quick, quicker than I expected. But my husband thought it was the best. My son’s halls seem about as nice as halls can be (although I realise I have literally never been in university halls in my life before!). His room is small, but there is plenty of storage and the furniture is pretty good quality. We helped my son unpack, then we left just half an hour later. I shed a few more tears, even though we’d already agreed we would see him briefly only four days later.

He’d been away interrailing with his friends for 2.5 weeks in August and September. I missed him and I worried about him. Compared to that, I thought university would be a doddle. Because he’s only an hour away. And he doesn’t have to worry about catching trains and different languages and organising his friends. He just has to live at university and go to lectures.

But actually going to university is very different to being on holiday. It is a deeper sense of loss. He’s not here any more. He doesn’t live here. And I really, really want him here. More than anything.

The day after he went was the Queen’s funeral and the bank holiday. I was grateful for that. A day when I didn’t have to think about work or anything else. I could just take it easy and be kind to myself. I cried once.

The next day, I was in an empty house. My husband and eldest were back at work, my daughter was back at school. My son should have been upstairs gaming and watching videos, before going for a dog walk with me and going to the gym. I lost count of the number of times I just burst into tears that day. It happened without warning.

Thank goodness for Hetty. One sniff from me and she knew that I needed her and came over to give me a hug.

My husband is less emotional than me. He’d expected to feel the loss less than I did, yet he really felt it too. Like me, he knew just how many positives there were for our son. But he felt the space in the middle of our family. And he worried for him too – about how he would cope with all the changes of new social situations and being organised and looking after himself.

We saw him on my birthday, four days after he went away. I was very reassured that he was settled and happy. His flatmates are party animals who go out every night. That isn’t for him, but he’s found his own balance. He sits up with them until they go out, then he goes to bed. They don’t give him a hard time for not drinking. He has athletics training three times a week and goes to the gym several times a week. He walks to the supermarket and cooks proper meals from scratch every day.

It was good to see him, because it at least meant I could stop worrying about him.

It didn’t stop me feeling sad though.

He’s decided he probably won’t come home again until his own birthday, in four weeks’ time. He has to do the right thing for him, but that hit me as it’s a long wait. I’d been so focused on seeing him on my birthday that I assumed that would make everything better.

It did. But only for a day or two. Then I had to face the rest of the time without him.

Saturday, six days after he left, was my first day without crying. But then I cried again on Sunday. I didn’t cry on Monday, but I cried on Tuesday and Wednesday.

There are triggers. The lunchtime dog walk is hard, because he always came with me. Strangely, supermarket shopping is a trigger. There are so many things I don’t need to buy any more, so many things I have to buy less of or buy smaller packs. Yet still we ended up with too many bananas and too much bread. And still I make meals which are too big.

These things are constant reminders. I need to put the washing machine on less often. I have to be careful to set less places at the table. The mileage on my car has gone down.

Yet I still get these split second moments when I think he will be home soon. Then I remember he won’t.

The house isn’t quieter, because he never made much noise. But we still feel his loss. The calm one. The quiet one. The positive one. The glue that kept us all together.

My nest is emptying and it will never feel quite the same again.

Photo by The Dark Queen on Unsplash