Learning to Fly Solo

A mom knows her baby birds will one day fly away. It’s a fact of life—when the time is right, the young leave the nest. It’s just so hard to let go.

“You have the house and the white picket fence. The mini-van is parked in the garage, and every room in your home is filled with the colors of childhood. You spend your weekends at the zoo, taking in the latest Pixar animation, and plan vacations to places like Disney World. Your every decision—from what neighborhood you live in to what food you stock in the fridge—is based on what is best for your child . . . then, in no time at all, you find yourself sitting at your child’s college graduation or wedding dealing with empty nest syndrome and wondering what you will do with
your life now.” —Adapted, from the Professor’s House

When my youngest left for college, I cried. Driving away from the school the day I dropped her off, tears started the minute I was outside the city limits—salty tears that forced me to the side of the road where I sat for awhile, sobbing.

It’s a curious truth that, as parents, we tend to stay in place and only move forward when our children do. Maybe it has something to do with settling down and nesting. Having lived vicariously through my daughter all of her life, her going to college was a wonderful adventure I was somehow going to vicariously experience . . . or so I thought.

In the daze that followed, reality set in. I wasn’t going anywhere, vicariously or otherwise. With both of my children gone, I had nowhere to go but back to my big, quiet, empty house. I moped around for weeks, alone for the first time in my adult life, with nothing more to do than take care of myself. My role as a mother was finished; and without this defining force in my life, I felt I had no real identity.

“When mothers talk about the depression of the empty nest, they’re not mourning the passing of all those wet towels on the floor, or the music that numbs your teeth, or even the bottle of capless shampoo dribbling down the shower drain. They’re upset because they’ve gone from supervisor of a child’s life to a spectator.” —Erma Bombeck

I am here to tell you—there is life beyond motherhood. It doesn’t come quickly, it doesn’t come easily, but it does come.

Here’s my best advice

Empty Nest Syndrome
is a psychological
condition that produces anxiety, loneliness, and heartache when one or more of the children leave home. It impacts women in particular because motherhood is viewed as a primary role for both working and stay-at-home moms . . . a role to which women dedicate themselves as a principal responsibility for an average of 20 years.

• Be gentle with yourself. What you’re feeling is perfectly normal.
• Stock up on tissue; you will cry.
• Allow yourself the time you need to grieve, work through the loss, and rebuild your life.
• Lower your expectations. Your child might not call every day. Accept it. It doesn’t mean they don’t love you.
• You’ll have good days, you’ll have bad days. Take each day as it comes.
• Keep busy.
• Get selfish. Concentrate on what’s going on in your own life. It doesn’t mean you don’t love your child.
• It doesn’t matter what other people think or say about moving on.
• If you have a spouse or partner or significant other, talk.
• If you need a friend, don’t hesitate to reach out.
• If your feelings are debilitating and preventing you from enjoying life, seek professional help. Seriously.

Once you accept the changes in your life and adjust to them, you can start to embrace and enjoy your new freedom as well as the opportunities that come with it.

“Imagine transplanting a flower or bush to a new location so it can grow healthier and stronger. For this to successfully occur, you have to dig up the plant and sever its roots. There’s an initial shock to the system, but planted in its new surroundings, it extends new roots and eventually establishes itself more firmly than before. And the hole that’s left behind can be filled in with fertile soil ready to nurture new opportunities.” —Linda Lowen

In Linda Lowen’s online article, Time to Fly–Surviving an Empty Nest, Mindy Holgate describes the process of letting go as “similar to paying out rope: First you ease it little-by-little; then suddenly it just slips out of your hands, and you’ve let go.”

So true . . . when you let go, your life begins to bloom independently on its own.

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