Empty nest echoes with yesterdays

Our goodbyes were relatively swift and tearless, which surprised me just a bit. Dropping a child off at a college campus hours from home is a seminal event that would seem to deserve at least a misty-eyed farewell.

But when the moving-in was finally complete, and the hugs and loving words were exchanged, our daughter simply turned away from us and strode purposefully, head erect, into the dormitory and toward the exciting challenges her new home represented.

“Well, she’s not looking back,” my wife said. “I guess that’s good.”

It was good, of course. Had our daughter broken down at that point, we probably would have done the same, which would have made the long trip home a heck of a lot longer. Instead, my wife and I drove north for the next several hours in quiet conversation as the radio played. The hectic pace of the last couple of days – packing the car, tending to last-minute details, helping the other parents cram all the worldly possessions of three teenagers into a dorm room built for two – had left us little time for introspection. We had been too busy to even think about missing her.

At home the next day, however, I walked past her bedroom and was caught off guard. Until that moment, the old house had felt the same as it had every morning for years. Yet standing in the doorway, staring at the discard pile of her material life, it hit me: This was no longer the room my daughter lived in, but the one she would only be visiting from now on. The once-vibrant little room suddenly felt airless and abandoned. I wasn’t prepared, either, when she called me at work the next day. When I first heard her cheery hello, I expected her to ask, as she had for years, if I wouldn’t mind picking up a few things at the grocery store on my way home. Instead, she asked hurriedly for her aunt’s address, told me things were going just fine at school, and then said she had to run.

“Love you, Dad, I’ll call you soon,” she said. And when we hung up, she felt far away for the very first time.

As parents of college freshmen everywhere are discovering in these last couple of weeks, letting go of our children doesn’t happen on the day we drop them off at school. Emptying the nest is a much more gradual process, filled with the small, unexpected moments that make us recognize that life won’t ever be the same again. A parent’s life is, as much as anything, a continuous process of letting go, of watching children move on to the next big stage in their lives and feeling the dizzying mix of joy and sadness, reward and loss, that comes with every new step they take out the door.

“I’m feeling a little disjointed and unsettled right now,” said a friend who recently dropped off his son at college last week and became a bona fide empty-nester in the process. I shared his sense of disorientation. After more than two decades of being parents, of immersing ourselves thoroughly in the most important roles of our lives, neither of us quite knows how to feel now that we’ve all but worked ourselves out of our child-rearing jobs.

I suppose I should consider my family’s mostly tearless, chin-up farewell on the campus last week as a testament to a job well done. For all of our parental insecurity and doubt over the years, it would appear that my wife and I have succeeded in raising a daughter who is eager to be stepping into the unknown and confident that she can find her way on her own.

And I’m certain her parents will be fine, too, just as soon as they figure out what the heck to do for an encore.