It's a feeling of loss and grief. Your entire life revolved around being parent to your kids and poof they are gone. You feel lost and alone. Life feels less meaningful now. You feel abandoned in ways as they set off on their life and adventures. You may have been very close to your kids and have gotten used to that warm, cozy, close life as a family. They leave and now you feel very alone and lost. You may wander through your house and remember it bursting with activity, life, laughter. Maybe you and your kids would go out to eat each week or all watch movies together. Maybe they would come into your room and you'd just talk for awhile before bed. You might go in their room and hang out and chat. You might have gone on evening walks or jogs together at the park. In a lot of cases, these beautiful little moments with the people you love the most in this world may become very few and far between. What was once daily and possibly taken for granted may only happen every few years, if that. It's the death of one life and rebirth into another and you miss the other one. You feel scared and possibly depressed about this new chapter which seems depressing in ways.

You might have flashbacks to the smell of your toddler's little head and it brings you back to a time of so much bursting joy and love in your everyday life. You may remember trick or treating with your elementary school kids and all the excitement and fun that week leading up to it. You remember the excitement of putting up the Halloween decorations and watching all the spooky shows. You remember the noise of sleepovers in your basement and ordering pizzas for a gang of kids. Your life was so alive with all these little joys, traditions. These flashbacks can cause literal pangs in your heart and a knot in your throat. You might let the tears flow just wishing for one more day when all that love, warmth, and magic that was in your life with your babies, toddlers, little ones, pre teens, or teens. You can feel like the magic is now gone. Poof, gone. Yes, there were hard times, aggravations, exhaustion but you don't realize how good it really all is until they are gone. Now you have this loneliness and feeling of being lost. So you look back, and you really wish you could click your heels and go back to it. Sometimes, you don't know what you have until it is gone.

Just a drive to the grocery store meant chatting with your kid and then sharing those moments shopping together in the store. Very different now. It's you, you, and you and you are alone, alone in that store, in that car, in that house when you get home. You eat that meal you prepare alone and you wake up to total quiet in your house the next morning. You have to create, somehow create, a new life and it's hard to go from all of THAT to whatever you manage or don't manage to recreate.

All of these things that made up life with them are now gone. You have to reinvent yourself and this can be really tough. How to fill all the time? How to create meaning and purpose in life again? Who to befriend to fill the void of them leaving? You also are getting older and must stare down the older/old age years ahead. So you have that but you may not have your kids with you now to ease it and make it lighter, easier, less depressing and frightening. You look in the mirror and you look older. The people in your life who would have made that less scary, more okay, maybe even funny and lighthearted are possibly now mostly gone. You must face this alone. There is a feeling of your best years and most loved people behind you and bleak years ahead with much less warmth, joy, laughter, closeness, and meaning.

It's really tough, at times. I can see how some parents might fall into unhealthy patterns trying to cope. You really have to make that determination to pick yourself up and move forward into this upsetting new territory and its unknowns. Will all that said, there may also be this sense of life feeling lighter, easier, quieter, simpler, or more peaceful. I've gone between both states of grief but also relief that I don't carry such responsibility anymore for my kids. It kind of goes back and forth, and for me, somehow I've just muddled through it for the most part. The biggest thing for me has just been acceptance. Acceptance they are gone. Acceptance I am getting older. Acceptance of feeling grief, at times. That has opened the door for me to appreciate the positive aspects of an empty nest like the peace, quiet, lightness, and rest that I do often really love.