Not The Norm

Personal Perspective: Empty nesting can feel like you're 22 again.

Circe partner Gina Frangello’s “Not the Norm” column on Psychology Today has relaunched after a 2 year hiatus, but as part of Circe’s inner circle, we’re delivering it directly to your inbox!

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First, move out of the home in which you have lived for a quarter century—in which your three children spent their entire childhoods here and your parents both died next to the same bay window. Do not hire those fancy movers who do everything, because you need to touch each item with your own hands and reckon with its history—your history—before it is packed or donated. This will be step one in discarding what no longer serves you: A process that will last the rest of your life.

Drive from Chicago to Wonder Valley, California, with your best friend since age 10. Listen to Spotify playlists like you once listened to carefully curated mix tapes when she drove you to New England at 22 to move in with the man who would become your first husband. Nostalgically belt “You’re So Vain” with the unselfconsciousness of siblings before falling silent as the San Bernadino fires cloud the sky and the landscape gives way from the highway to rocky sand. When she says, “It’s like you’re moving to the surface of the moon,” she will be right in more ways than she knows.

Stop checking your youngest child’s college email. With her permission, you got into the habit during the admissions process, as many of the emails—then—pertained to you economically, such as providing proof of health insurance and meeting deadlines to sign promissory notices for Federal loans. Now, she is settled in her dorm, has a full course load, and is joined at the hip with the student you and her stepfather elbowed each other about at family orientation, whispering, “There’s our girl’s new best friend.” Take some pleasure in having been right about that. Now, back off. Remember: She is starting her new life too.

Lose many months of un-backed-up content on your laptop when it abruptly dies. This erasure of history feels too on-the-nose for an empty nester who just moved 2000 miles away from your home city. Drive over an hour to the Palm Desert Genius Bar, where they say they can “fix” your computer, but that would involve wiping it clean. The data recovery service they refer you–even emailing you a pre-paid label–costs as much as a used beater car. Buy a new laptop for a fraction of the money, unsure.

Spend copious amounts of time in your car. This is a pastime for everyone in Southern California, but for you, it evokes New England in your early twenties, when you lived an hour-plus from your grad program and forty-five minutes from most of your jobs. You wonder why more people do not talk about how empty nesting can resemble being age 22 again, the world new, exciting, and slightly terrifying, your path wildly uncharted.

Go to the farmer’s market and lovingly choose vegetables for dinners you and your husband cook, just for the two of you, and eat by candlelight on your screened-in porch. You’ve spent 25 years tending to elderly, sick parents and raising children, so this is the first time you have lived alone with a partner since you were barely over 30—young enough to be your own daughter now. Drum as loudly as you like while your husband plays guitar; have sex in parts of the house not your bedroom; rarely close a door. Feel giddy with an intimate freedom you’d forgotten existed.

At other times, feel an untamed, hollow loneliness you have not experienced since before your twin daughters were placed in your arms in China in 2001. This loneliness was your constant companion as an only child, especially on Sundays, and followed you into your first marriage, but after so long, you believed it a vanquished enemy. Now, lean in. Ask what it is trying to teach you. Welcome it back like an old friend, grateful for the chance to learn its contours rather than run.

Call the area where you live “a Cormac McCarthy novel, with sand.” There seem to be about 50 men for every woman: loners, drifters, shamans, on the lam? Go to the only yoga studio in town and immediately exchange texts with another woman who proclaims, “People from Wonder Valley don’t go to yoga.” Yet there you both are! Remember how friendships formed easily in your twenties before everyone—yourself included—circled the wagons of family and specialized careers, becoming walled off. Feel yourself unfurling.

Visit one of your daughters in LA, where she is in her first year of law school. Her twin just started a new teaching job in Brooklyn. As recently as the pandemic quarantine, you all lived under one roof; now, you are scattered to the wind. Feel lucky that your kids are doing well enough that you can focus on this new chapter of your own life. Feel gratitude for hip replacements, chemo, and even mastectomies, because you are alive and no longer in debilitating pain. You have the luxury of self-discovery. When you were diagnosed with cancer at 47, you would have been stunned to be still alive at 56. Feel greedy for more time. Breathe through the rush of wanting. Breathe through the wondering How long? Breathe under a glass dome sky as you drive (and drive) surrounded by mountains and thickets of wind turbines. Wonder how the world can be so beautiful for even one minute, and how you exist, to see it.

Finally, maybe someday you will go to the one FedEx in town, print that label, and mail your computer to those overpriced data recovery specialists. Could it hold history you might need someday? But for now, just knowing there is a FedEx in town is enough.