I was sitting on the couch, watching the Red Sox get hammered by the Yankees, when my daughter reminded me that I might want to start thinking about the huge turn my life would soon be taking.

“Just think, Dad,” she said, with what I took to be a playful glint in her eyes as she bounded up the stairs. “By the time this summer is over, and I go off to college, you and Mom won’t have any kids left in the house at all. The place is gonna be empty!”

I know she was angling for a fatherly reaction, and she got it. She had casually dropped a bomb that I didn’t see coming, and it seemed to suck the air right out of the room for an instant. Her blithe comment was an early goodbye, of sorts, a fond farewell as she eagerly anticipated a future that wasn’t going to include her parents very much anymore. With a son already living at a nearby school that might as well be in California for the infrequency of his visits home, and a daughter who will be packing up and heading a few hours south before we know it, my wife and I have finally arrived at that most critical stage in our parenting lives: We are soon to become empty-nesters.

It’s not that parents don’t have years to get ready for such large-scale upheavals in the familiar routine they’ve known since their kids came wailing into the world. It’s been said that our children start leaving us the moment they wriggle out of our arms and toddle across the floor for the first time, even if parents don’t recognize this subtlest of departures. Next thing you know, our children’s burgeoning social lives and driver’s licenses are taking them farther away from us every day, until we can actually start to hear the echoes of our own voices in homes that had pulsed for years with youthful energy. Then we come home one fine autumn day to find that the old place really is empty and uncommonly still.

Over the years I’ve talked with parents who have looked forward to that day. They couldn’t wait to remodel a college-bound son’s bedroom into the office they’ve always wanted. No more teenagers calling the house all evening long, no more late nights worrying until the car pulls into the driveway so parents can finally go to sleep. No more of that horrid rap music blasting through the house, no more – thank God – MTV. Except for having to pay off the college bills, these good-and-loving parents were grateful that soon their all-consuming child-rearing roles would be behind them.

Yet I’ve known an equal number of parents for whom an empty nest is the most forlorn place on Earth. A couple of fathers I know, both of whom live active, productive, satisfying lives, have confided to me how they all but fell apart when the last of their kids had moved away to college. One guy, having helped his freshman daughter settle into her dorm room at a distant university, blubbered like a baby as he and his wife drove from the campus and back to their eerily childless house.

I suppose I’ll have to wait a bit longer to see where I’ll fall into the mix. Somewhere in the middle, I would imagine: Immensely proud of the confident young woman who will be stepping out into the world, and sad that my small part in helping to shape the person she has become is mostly complete. And while she’s out there trying to figure out who she is and where she’s going in life, I guess I’ll have no choice but to do the same for myself right here at home. Maybe I’ll turn one of the kids’ bedrooms into an office and write that book I’ve been meaning to get to. I’ll call it, “Everything a Parent Should Know, and Never Will.”