My son is moving out. I’m happy for him but I’m bereft. I know “empty nest” is a cliche but it’s out of control and it’s ruining my relationship with him. It feels like grief. I’m tearful all the time. I can’t bear to look at old photos of us. I feel awkward around him, like I’m looking for the old connection when he was little that he’s rightly moved on from.
I wasn’t a happy person before him and without him I’m afraid I’ll go back to how I was. My partner is supportive but I hide how much I’m obsessing about this because there’s only so many times she can sit through my sobbing. He’s still present and wonderful; he needs to go and live his life and I know he’ll come back. How can I stop feeling so terrible about a thing that I know is good and right and natural?
Eleanor says: It’s OK to not feel OK about something you know is good and right. This is a huge loss. One of the biggest chapters of your life is closing. Knowing that he deserves to feel free and happy about this does not mean you have to; his experience doesn’t have to be your experience. You don’t live life through his eyes, you live it as his parent. That means feeling more vulnerable, poignant, nostalgic and divided than the young person in the protagonist’s seat. That’s just the condition of parenthood. You would be a very weird parent indeed if you and he had identical feelings about his life.
So how do you do it? How do you make room for the good bits?
First, accept your mixed feelings. I hear you when you say you feel more consumed by this than you’d like, but that doesn’t mean the goal has to be eliminating grief altogether. We mourn the things we’ve cherished. This feeling speaks to how much you’ve loved having him around. You want it to not consume you – or him – but that doesn’t mean you have to feel bad about your heartache. Sometimes feelings get more intense precisely because we expect ourselves to settle firmly on “happy” or “sad”, with no ambivalence, so each side starts clamouring to win. If we were able to calmly think my final verdict is that I feel mixed, some of those feelings might come off the screaming boil.
Second, I heard a real fear in what you said about “going back” to how you were before you were happy. I think that wants therapy, not just mental re-framing. It can be a lot for your son to carry, knowing that he’s the source of your happiness, and he’ll realise whether you tell him or not. Parents have some obligations not to let their children feel the full force of their emotional vulnerability. A bit like for a teacher or a therapist, it’s part of doing the job well that you don’t let the people who activate these feelings know their full scale. And, also like for a teacher or a therapist, it can be really helpful – even responsible – to make space outside these relationships for processing the things they bring up. Things like what it means to you that he’s leaving, what it might bring up about your identity, especially if you’re hiding the full persistence of this feeling from your partner.
Last, practically, get busy. Some of the best advice I ever got for missing someone was to fill your days with the things you can’t do when they’re around. Travel? Romantic time at home with your partner? Interests that are just yours? The point is to remind yourself that there are parts of you outside of them, and that the world outside their absence still holds fun you haven’t had.
It’s OK to feel the loss. The fact that you feel this much shows you how much devotion and care you’re capable of. You can use some of that for this next chapter of your own life, too.
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