Raging at the Empty Nest

I was angry when my last child went to college. Sad, yes, of course. But also mad. Pissed. At myself. I’d spent twenty years listening to the warnings. “Be careful if you stay home with the kids because the kids leave and then you’ll have nothing left.” And as I drove away from my daughter’s overly pretty college dorm, I felt the thing I hate. I felt like everyone else was right, and I had been wrong. Because what was I now? Who was I without any kids to take care of. What exactly does a retired stay-at-home mom do?

I refused to leave the house for weeks because I didn’t want to run into people at the grocery store. I had no answer to “what are you doing now?” What was I supposed to say? Everyone knows I hate cooking and pickleball. I wasn’t in a Mahjong group and, to be honest, wasn’t feeling terribly social.

“What are you doing now?” I heard it so many times I almost went mad. “I’m not suddenly solving for world peace, Susan. I’ve basically finished cleaning the sludge out of the fridge. The closets actually seem too daunting to approach.” I was tired of explaining that decluttering wasn’t blowing up my skirt.

So when my last child left, I went into hiding. Yes, a fifty-three-year-old woman was so scared of telling people she had no life that she made her life even smaller.

I went to a funeral. And hid. I hid. At a funeral. Because I couldn’t bear telling the uber-busy doctor moms that I now created Instagram reels in my office. I didn’t have it in me to say that they had made the better choice by continuing to work. That they still had lives, but mine had stopped.

What would I say if they caught up to me and asked: “What have you been up to?”

“Learning to make fonts on Canva match the cup of coffee I had at breakfast, you?”

“Oh, you saved three lives. Well done.”

Also, how very Catherine Earnshaw of me to make someone else’s funeral a referendum on my status as a woman without a purpose.

What I noticed that day, about my inability to meet others where they were either in sorrow over a loss or joy over their achievements, was that I held a lot of friction. I wasn’t ready to slow down. And I was deeply ashamed that I didn’t know what came next. I was filled with discomfort and shame.

Shame is sticky. It’s quicksand. You can’t get out of it by forcing your way. You’re supposed to stay calm and think through the situation.

Discomfort is good. It’s the feeling that compels you forward. The key, I think, is to release the shame and embrace the discomfort.

I didn’t know what I was doing with my life, but I decided anything was better than nothing. I woke up every day. I drank my coffee and listened to the floors creak and the washer wash. Were these sounds so loud before the kids left?

No matter. I went to work. Canva. Templify. Shame. Sadness.

Eventually I reached a point that when shame said “you’re too old to start something new,” discomfort won. Discomfort said, “If I don’t try anything new, I will be stuck. Forever.”

2 PM was my witching hour. The time I usually grabbed my keys and headed out to get my daughter. 2 PM was the hour my life had revolved around for twenty years. 2 PM was the worst moment of every day. I walked through the house. Held her pillows. Looked at her hair bands. Thought about how much I loved picking her up from school with a special Matcha Latte.

According to my best friend, Chat, my messages evolved in September. The discourse changed from “I am too sad to move,” to “what would happen if I stopped worrying about failure. How much could I grow if I stopped believing I am too old?”

It was easy to stop worrying about failing because I already knew I was a failure. Armed with the freedom of already believing I sucked, I bulldozed into content creation. Montages of me dancing to Taylor Swift and Defying Gravity peppered my grid. I was completely unbothered by what people were calling my cringe era. I was documenting my lack of a career one reel at a time.

Then something weird happened. Other women showed up. “Me too.” “What do we do now that they are gone?” “I feel so old, but not so old that I am done.” “Are we done?” “Do you really not play Pickleball?”

All of us were wondering the same thing. Had staying home with our kids been a huge mistake?