What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About the Empty Nest

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There is no manual.

I cannot give you one. I looked for one and it does not exist and honestly that made me so mad because somebody should have written it a long time ago.

What I can give you is my story. The real version. All of it. And I hope it helps because nobody talked about this stuff when I was growing up and I genuinely want to know why. Was it forbidden? Were we just supposed to smile and say the kids grew up and life is great and move on? Because that is not what happened to me and I do not believe for one second that it is what happened to most of you either.

If you know me you know I do not skip the hard parts. I do not dress things up. I do not hand you the inspirational version and leave out everything that actually happened. I have never performed for anyone in my life and I am not about to start now.

So here it is. The stuff nobody told me. The stuff I had to figure out the hard way. The stuff I wish someone had sat down and just said out loud before my daughters grew up and the house got quiet.

The Quiet Is Not What You Think It Is

I was a single Mom. Lauren and Gracie were not just my kids. They were literally everything. Every decision, every dollar, every calendar square, every single day was organized around those two girls and I would not have had it any other way.

So when people said the house would be quieter I thought okay. I can handle quieter. I had been running on fumes for years and honestly part of me was looking forward to sitting down for five minutes without someone needing something.

I did not understand what that quiet was actually going to feel like.

It felt like every single thing that used to fill that house was still in the air somehow. You walk past a bedroom and the door is open and the room is clean and there is nobody in it and something in your chest does a thing you were not expecting. You hear a sound and for just a half second you think someone is home and then you remember.

And then there is the coffee situation.

We lived in a small town. No coffee shop around the corner. Getting coffee meant driving and I did that drive with my girls more times than I can count. It did not matter what time it was. 10:30 at night and the 7 Brew was open? We went. No question. Because that drive was our time. That was where the real conversations happened. The stuff that only comes out when you are in a car going somewhere and there is nothing else to do but be together.

Here is what you need to know about me and coffee. I did not even like it.

I learned to like it. I taught myself to enjoy coffee just to have those moments with them. Just to have a reason to get in the car no matter what hour it was and drive somewhere and sit across from my girls.

I do not make coffee at home anymore. There is no point. But when I am with Lauren or Gracie we go get it. Every single time. Because that is still ours.

And then there is Life 360.

Nobody brings up Life 360 in the empty nest conversation and I think we need to talk about it because it is both completely real and honestly a little bit funny once you get some distance from it. You spent 18 to 20 years knowing where your kids were every single moment of every single day. That is not a habit. That is wiring. That goes all the way down.

So there you are. Kids are grown. Out living their lives. And you are on your phone at 11 o’clock at night checking the app not because anything is wrong but because your whole body still needs to know where they are. The app says they are home. You exhale. You feel a little ridiculous. You check again in an hour.

I still pay the phone bill by the way. So I am going to check.

Give Yourself Permission to Grieve. And Then Give Yourself a Timeline.

This is the one I feel most strongly about so I am going to say it as clearly as I know how.

Take the time to grieve the empty nest. Give yourself actual permission to feel it. This is a massive change. This is huge. You do not just pivot out of 18 to 20 years of your entire identity and purpose and daily life and land on your feet in a week. Anyone who tells you that you should is not being honest with you.

I spent months hiding out on my couch. Genuinely miserable in a way I had not expected and could not fully explain to anyone around me. And every time one of my girls called I popped right up off that couch and answered like I had my whole life together. Happy voice. Everything is great. Mom is fine.

Mom was not fine.

And that is okay. That is allowed.

But here is what I also learned. You have to give yourself a timeframe. You cannot stay on the couch indefinitely and call it grieving. At some point that becomes hiding and hiding does not move you forward.

For me it was always two days. Two days is my number. I would let myself feel it completely and then at 48 hours I made myself get up and do one thing I had been putting off. Not something fun. Not a reward. Just one actual thing that needed to happen. And I held myself accountable to that.

What happens when you do that consistently is you start building a habit. You start saying yes to yourself in small ways and then slightly bigger ways and the more you do it the more natural it feels and the more natural it feels the more you do it. You are creating a pattern of making yourself important. Even on the hard days. Especially on the hard days.

Schedule your misery if you have to. Give it its time. And then get up.

The Grief Is Real Even When Everyone Is Okay

My girls are doing amazingly. Genuinely. Lauren has built a beautiful life and family. Gracie is out in Denver being completely herself and thriving. I could not be more proud of either of them if I tried.

Everyone is okay.

And I still grieved. And nobody told me that was allowed.

The empty nest grief is not grief for your kids. It is grief for the chapter. For the version of your life that was built around their daily presence. For the purpose that showed up every single morning with the alarm clock and the practices and the permission slips and the hard conversations and the ordinary Tuesday nights that you did not even know you would miss.

You miss Tuesday nights. That is a real thing that happens and I know it sounds small and it is not small at all.

I also lost Rocky. I did this whole season as a widowed single mom and that adds a layer to the empty nest that does not get talked about enough. Because when the kids leave it is not just one kind of quiet. It is quiet that has more than one kind of loss layered inside it. And learning to be okay with all of that took time.

You are allowed to grieve all of it. Every single layer. Do not let anyone put a timeline on your heart except you.

People Are Going to Say the Wrong Thing and Most of Them Mean Well

Someone is going to tell you that you must love the freedom. Someone is going to say you should be celebrating. Someone is going to look at you blankly when you try to explain what the house feels like now because they are not there yet and they genuinely cannot picture it.

Let them.

They mean well. Most people mean well. They just do not know what to say so they say the thing that sounds positive because that feels safe. And I have never once in my life performed okay for other people and I am not going to tell you to start doing it now.

You do not have to rush to the silver lining so everyone around you feels comfortable. You do not have to wrap it up in a bow. You can just be in it for a while. You can say this is hard and leave it right there without following it up with anything.

Hard is a complete sentence sometimes.

And for the people saying all the wrong things with all the right intentions go ahead and say a little prayer for them. Because their time is coming. Every single one of them. Whether they know it or not. Whether they show it or not.

“Hard is a complete sentence sometimes. You do not have to follow it up with anything.”

The Relationship With Your Kids Gets Better — But You Have to Let It

This is the one that surprised me more than anything else on this list and I really wish someone had told me because I would have relaxed a little sooner.

The relationship gets better. It genuinely does. But I want to be real about that word if because it matters more than people say.

It does not happen overnight. It does not happen automatically. It requires you to shift out of the role you played for 20 years and learn a new one. We do not need to boss them around anymore. We need to guide them strategically. We need to learn when to speak and when to just be there. We need to control our words and sometimes our reactions and sometimes our timing because the relationship we want with them as adults is worth being intentional about.

That is a learned skill. Some days I am still learning it.

But when you get there. When you stop trying to parent them the way you did when they were 15 and you start showing up for who they actually are right now.

Lauren is my business partner. She is one of my closest friends. She is the person I call when something amazing happens and the person I call when something falls apart. We built something together I never could have pictured when she was a teenager and we were just trying to get through the week.

Gracie is out in Denver being completely herself and watching her from a distance is honestly one of the greatest things I have ever gotten to witness.

The relationship does not end when they leave. It becomes something new. Something you could not have predicted. But you have to do the work of letting it become that.

Here Is What I Know Now

I am determined to make this one of the best chapters of my life. I want you to hear that word. Determined. Not hoping. Not waiting to see. Determined.

I lost my husband. I raised two daughters alone. I built businesses and paid bills and showed up to every single thing for years and I pushed Mandy to the bottom of the list without even realizing I was doing it because there was always something more urgent and someone who needed me more.

And then the house got quiet. And I had to figure out who I was.

Some days that was really hard. Some days I sat in that quiet and I cried and I did not know what came next. And then I got up at the 48 hour mark and I did one thing. And then I did it again. And again.

Travel. This community. A brand I built with my daughter. A podcast. A half marathon I am training for at 51 years old. A life that is mine in a way it has never fully been mine before.

If you are sitting on your couch right now in the middle of it I see you. I was you. And I am not going to tell you to look on the bright side or that everything happens for a reason or any of the things people said to me that I smiled through and did not believe.

What I am going to tell you is this.

Give yourself the two days. Feel every single bit of it. Cry it out. Sit in it. And then at 48 hours get up and do one thing. Just one. It does not have to be big. It does not have to fix anything. It just has to be something.

And then do it again the next time.

And keep doing it until saying yes to yourself becomes the habit. Until making yourself important becomes the thing you do automatically. Until you look up one day and realize the chapter you are in right now is actually really good.

Because it can be. I promise you it can be.

You just have to get up.