Empty Nest Syndrome: Empty Nest Syndrome: Loss, Relief, and Reinvention
Empty nest syndrome hits differently than you expect. I just watched the first two episodes of Sharon Horgan's "Youth" and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Not just because it's good, which it is, but because it gave me something I didn't realize I was hungry for: a fleshed out portrayal of a woman over 60 who is still vital, visible, working, and sexual.
In it she plays a divorced woman whose son leaves for college, then comes quickly home again. Watching it brought back all the complicated feelings that come with empty nest syndrome. The devastating loss. The crying spells. The giddiness of setting up a gym in the newly empty bedroom. The feeling of "I can do anything I want now," followed almost immediately by the unsettling question of what exactly it was you were so eager to do.
That's empty nest syndrome. All of it, at once, sometimes within the same afternoon.
The loss is real
When your child leaves, they take a big chunk of your identity with them. An entire childhood, over in the blink of an eye. The friends who used to drop by. The sports practices and games. The plays, the meals, the noise. The specific texture of a life built around someone else's schedule and needs.
Are you even still a mom? Of course you are. But in a different way, and nobody really prepares you for what that different way feels like in the first weeks and months. There is a hole where all of that used to live and it's bigger than you expected.
What I see in my office is that people are often blindsided not by the missing their kid part, they anticipated that, but by the missing the role part. The loss of structure. The loss of purpose that arrived daily and automatically. The loss of knowing exactly who you were and what you were supposed to be doing.
And it can also be a relief
Here's the part people feel guilty admitting: it can also feel really good.
The quiet. Listening to your music. Walking around the house in your underwear. No wet towels on the bathroom floor. The freedom to make plans without coordinating around someone else's schedule. The sudden realization that you can eat dinner at 10pm or not eat dinner at all and nobody needs anything from you.
That relief doesn't mean you don't love your kid. It means you gave an enormous amount of yourself for a very long time and some part of you knows it. Both things are true and both are allowed.
This is the question empty nest syndrome eventually brings to everyone. This is the question that tends to arrive a few weeks in, once the initial wave of feeling has passed. The hole is still there but you're starting to look at it differently. Not just as a loss but as a space. And spaces can be filled.
Who are you now, outside of the role that organized your life for nearly two decades? You get to decide that. Which is exciting and terrifying in roughly equal measure. The women I work with who navigate this transition well aren't the ones who had it all figured out. They're the ones who got curious, tried things, changed their minds, and gave themselves permission to not have the answer immediately.
If you're part of a couple
Empty nest syndrome lands differently depending on where your relationship is. For some couples it's a genuine renaissance. More time together, more spontaneity, more of each other in the ways that got crowded out by parenting. For others it reveals the distance that built up gradually over the years, the realization that the kids were the common thread and now you're two people in a house figuring out what comes next. It may be a time to re-evaluate whether you both want the same things in this next phase, and if not, can you go your own way amicably and still have Thanksgiving and holidays with your children and grandchildren?
Neither of those is a verdict. Both are worth paying attention to.
What Sharon Horgan gets right
What struck me most about "Youth" is that it doesn't resolve anything neatly. The character is figuring it out in real time, making mistakes, finding unexpected joy, sitting with loss, moving forward anyway. She's not waiting to feel ready. She's just living.
That feels true to me, both as a therapist and as someone who has been through her own version of this. Empty nest syndrome isn't a problem to be solved. It's a transition to be lived through, with as much honesty and curiosity as you can bring to it.
Written by Tracy Sondern, LMFT. In person in Los Feliz, Los Angeles and online throughout California.
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