Forget the Empty Nest. Trade It for the Open Door.
8 min read
On a sunny Thursday in August, my husband and I dropped off our daughter Eleanor for her freshman year of college. The three of us raced to unload the car during our 8–8:20-a.m. time slot, lugged boxes and bags up to her room, argued about how to install the bed risers. We unpacked Eleanor’s new shower caddy, twin-XL sheets, towels, and storage bins. I performed the sacred making-of-the-dorm-bed ritual, and as I did, I felt the weight of knowing that this was the last time I would perform that kind of service, as that kind of mother, for that kind of child.
“Oh, Mom, are you crying?” Eleanor asked tenderly as I gave her a long, tight hug. “I never see you cry!”
I nodded without answering. I couldn’t speak. I tried to put into that hug everything I couldn’t say.
Many parents might relate to that scene, as well as to the uncomfortable mix of emotions I felt as my husband and I drove away from campus: gratitude, hopefulness, melancholy. We had spent so much time and effort helping Eleanor—and before her, our daughter Eliza—to make this transition, from dependence to greater independence. With both daughters launched, Jamie and I were left to face the question: Now what?
That day, we joined the ranks of the “empty nesters,” the millions of Americans whose adult children no longer live at home. According to a Census Bureau analysis of data from the 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation, its most recent analysis available, the United States had roughly 22.5 million empty-nest couples a decade ago, though our numbers today are surely larger (the 2014 survey data did not include single or same-sex parents).
I have always disliked the term empty nest, which to me emphasizes loss and abandonment—though I understand why the term has stuck. When my husband and I walked back into our apartment, it did feel empty, and over the next few weeks, it felt even emptier. Eleanor’s bed was always made. Her room was unnaturally tidy. We had less food in the fridge, fewer shoes by the door, and a vacant chair at the kitchen table. I took a nap on Eleanor’s bed. I touched her books. I felt her absence.
So empty nest does capture a certain atmosphere. But it’s not a useful metaphor for adults left wondering what to do once their kids are gone. Words matter; they have the power to shape our expectations, to shift the way we see and how we act. Practice piano or play piano? Spend time or invest time? Office politics or office diplomacy? Emptynest or …?
As a person who years ago embarked on my own “Happiness Project,” I balked at empty nest’s connotations of futility or meaninglessness. No wonder so many adults, when and if they anticipate this stage of life, consider it with dread. I found myself searching for a different metaphor—one that could help me and parents like me not to languish but to see this new phase as a time of self-discovery, possibility, and growth.
I considered and rejected several alternatives. Free rein?—but that suggested an unappealing level of license. Better bandwidth?—accurate, but too clunky. Open waters?—hmm, I liked the image of a ship sailing across a wide sea, but I wanted a metaphor that would evoke home and family. And then, at last, I had it: open door.
Open door, I realized, works on many levels. It emphasizes that family members leave and return, sometimes for short periods, other times for longer. It describes how my husband and I can now take a last-minute trip to visit friends, because our door is more open for us than when we had children to care for. It’s also a phrase of welcome. It stresses that our daughters can come and go as they please—our door is always open!—and that although my husband and I may be busy with our own lives, we are, like the manager who maintains an open-door policy, always available if someone needs our attention or advice.
Empty nest has such an air of finality. It’s also something of a relic, implying that once the birds fly away, the nest stays empty. Open door is much more fitting at a time when adult children’s bonds with their parents have gotten tighter, and when grown kids are more likely to return to live at home than they were a generation ago. (In which case, maybe it’s a revolving door as well as an open one.)
Any reference to the open door or empty nest is of course an oversimplification of a transition that people encounter in wildly different ways. For some parents, the open-door moment comes when their oldest child, rather than their youngest, leaves home, or when a child moves across the country or marries. Some parents will never experience the open door because their child will remain dependent on them forever. Some might be unable to take advantage of this period because of financial limitations or health problems. And some might trade the responsibilities of parenthood for grandparenthood, or become caregivers for older relatives, without a break.
But whenever this moment does arrive, it is typically a time of unavoidable self-evaluation—a major transition with sometimes painful changes to routine, home, and relationships, and for many parents, their sense of identity and purpose. It allows people—forces people—to reflect.
Americans today live significantly longer than they did several decades ago, which means the quality of this period of life is incredibly important. If I reach the age of my still-active parents, I’ll be in the open-door phase for longer than I was a child living in their home, longer than I was a child-free young adult, and longer than I was a parent raising children—a huge chunk of my existence. But although many people in their youth imagine the experience of someday leaving home, going to college, or raising children, a remarkable number arrive at the open-door moment having given it little thought. “I have four sons,” an acquaintance told me. “It took so much effort to get them all launched, I never thought about myself, except to think that it would be a relief to be done. Now I feel adrift.”
That lack of foresight isn’t surprising. The tumult of everyday family routine can make it hard for people to step back and think about their lives. As I often remind myself, something that can be done at any time tends to be done at no time, and the demands of parenthood make it easy to delay facing what can be difficult questions. Am I living the life I want to live?Is it too late to start something new?Do I really want to be married anymore? Or simply: Now is it okay to eat meals in front of the TV?
Some people I’ve encountered whose children have left home have told me—in tones of shame, sadness, or bewilderment—that they’re reassessing long-standing habits and relationships. “I thought I had a group of friends, but I didn’t,” a woman seated next to me on an airplane last year said. Her social circle was tied to her daughter’s activities, such as soccer and violin; once her daughter graduated, those bonds dissolved. Some have reported a crisis of identity. “I keep asking myself, What am I for?” a friend said. Another warned me to resist the lure of all those hours freed up on my schedule: “I know you love to work, but be careful not to work all the time, because now you can.”
The open door is a reminder of possibilities: What might await us on the other side? We’re not sitting in a vacated nest, passively watching as someone else takes flight; we have our own places to go and plans to make. This is a time of opportunity if met with purpose. I have friends who have started companies, embraced new interests, returned to old passions, and moved to a different town. Many are embracing restored freedoms. “I have popcorn and wine for dinner every night,” a friend confided to me. “Now I sleep late and walk around naked,” another reported.
I’m not arguing that the substitution of a simple phrase is enough to transform feelings of grief into cheerful optimism. Every so often, I get a sick, shocked feeling in my stomach when I remember: It’s over. The other day, I choked up in the drugstore when Harry Chapin’s song “Cat’s in the Cradle” started playing over the sound system: “My child arrived just the other day / He came to the world in the usual way.” It’s a song about how quickly children grow up, how parents lose their place as the center of their kids’ lives—and how that change may bring regret and sorrow. The days are long, but the years are short.
I tend to push hard feelings aside. Here, the open door metaphor has also proved useful, reminding me to stay open to contradictory emotions. So many things can be true at once: Yes, I recognize that everything I’ve been going through falls into the category of cliché; and yes, the experience has felt startling and unexpected. Since the day Eleanor headed off to kindergarten, I’ve planned and hoped for this transition, yet still it seems sudden. I want my daughters to know that they are essential to my happiness and that my happiness does not depend on them. My world feels smaller and bigger.
In October, two long (and also short) months after we dropped Eleanor off, my husband and I visited her for Family Weekend. Under yellow leaves shining against a brilliantly blue sky, we crisscrossed the campus so that she could show us where she took her classes, where she studied in the library, how she had decorated her dorm room for Halloween. We met her friends and heard about her midterms.
As she was describing some late-night party drama, I interrupted to ask, “Are you careful when you walk around at night? Really careful?” “Of course I am, Mom,” she answered. Then she returned to her story.
And it hit me: We had arrived at that moment of the paradox of parenting. Jamie and I would always be parents, we would always love and worry, we would always come running in case of emergency—but we’d worked hard at the labor of parenthood to put ourselves out of a job. Now the way to step up was to step back, and the way to hold on was to let go. At the same time, as I saw the intensity of Eleanor’s experience, I craved that expansiveness for myself: more relationships, deeper knowledge, fresh adventures. For me, too, a new door was swinging open.
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