My nest finally emptied this summer when my youngest daughter, Rosa, passed her A-levels. She is now working all hours in a local restaurant and about to head off on gap-year travels. My son, Tommy, left for university in Brighton on the East Sussex coast in September and my eldest, Caitlin, graduated two years ago. She, along with my stepdaughters, Freya and Natasha, lives in London. I cannot count the number of times empty-nester friends have congratulated me with: “Job done! Finally, you’re free! Come join the party!” As a man it feels as if I am doubly expected to embrace this release from parental servitude. The truth is, it doesn’t feel that way.
I have always been very close to my children. When my relationship with their mother broke up, they came to live with me. As the main “carer”, it might be the case that I feel their absence more keenly than a typical male “provider”. Even so, I have been surprised at just how strong the feelings of loss have been.
The most obvious and toughest challenge has been nest management. To pay for Tommy’s extortionate university accommodation fees we have installed a lodger in his old room. Carrie is certainly cleaner and tidier than my son. Nevertheless, clearing his stuff out broke my heart, the more so because, as a more than averagely untidy boy, his whole life was laid out for me in geological layers.
Under the discarded itchy jacket for his last school prom were his A-level revision notes, and under that were his goalkeeping gloves, and under those were his BB gun, and under that a collection of Bob the Builder books, all the way back to a Christmas list reading: “Mor fotbal stuf plus choc”. I sat on his bed picking through these artefacts with tears in my eyes. I guess it’s a rite of passage that goes largely unreported. When my mum died two years ago I cleared out her attic and was astonished to find my first school blazer hidden in an old suitcase.
There have been smaller challenges too, some of which make me feel as if I’m making a bigger deal of this than most. For example, I have changed my walking route with our Jack Russell, Billie. I don’t want to walk past the café where I used to go with the children every weekend. Table three is where Rosa told me I needed to stop saying “Hi guys” to all her friends when I saw them on the street, and that I had to get rid of my favourite scruffy sweatshirt. Table four is where Caitlin told me she had cried her way through the first term of uni but didn’t come home because she knew I would be worried.
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Sometimes I wonder if I need support for Billie too. If a strapping young Amazon delivery man bearing any resemblance to Tommy calls round, she sniffs round him carefully and then, disappointed, goes back to slump in her basket.
My wife, Susanna, has been surprised by the intensity of my feelings. It’s true, the space that Tommy has left in the nest has proved particularly hard to deal with. That’s partly because I still see Rosa between her restaurant shifts for about an hour a day. But also, the father-son dynamic is different. There is still a football in the back of the car, kept there just in case we could squeeze in ten minutes at the park on the way back from the supermarket. And I can’t debate the future of cryptocurrency like I did with Tommy with anyone else.
My empty-nest blues are not all selfless grieving, though. They are underpinned with jitters about getting older. Some of those friends who slap me on the back and say, “Job done! You’re sorted now aren’t you?” have an agenda. There is an empty-nester social scene, which they want me to get excited about. If I’m honest, the very idea fills me with dread.
At 57, I have friends whose children flew the nest a few years ago and their invitations are already being texted in. A long boozy weekend in Prague? How about we get some of those Nordic walking poles and do the South West Coast Path? I think the pandemic has amplified a sense among empty-nesting boomers that we should make the most of things. Some are even drawing down pension lump sums and taking early retirement.
More than once I’ve heard: “Sod it, I’ve earned it. I’m going to enjoy myself.”
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But as my wife will attest, I am not a big fan of non-targeted, open-ended enjoyment. I think having a good time is overrated and sometimes dangerous. Show me a cruise-ship brochure and I’ll show you old codgers being lifted off the sundeck by helicopter after a mass E.coli outbreak.
I’m aware that’s miserable and I have not timed my mood dip well. Susanna and I raised our five children together. However, her corner of the nest emptied out earlier than mine. Her daughters, Natasha and Freya, went to university three years ago. Sometimes I wish we could have synchronised our empty-nest heartbreak better. Susanna is through that dark tunnel of loss and going great guns with the next phase of her career while I am still sorting through Year 5 drawings and wondering which of them I can bear to put in the recycling. The answer to that, so far, is none.
The big change will ask questions of any marriage. In our early years together there didn’t seem to be time for anything with so many young children around. No time to talk. No time for date night. And sex? How many Saturday mornings did we spend telling our boggle-eyed walk-ins that mum was just climbing over dad to get to the bathroom?
We didn’t have time for fun and so spent any moment we had planning the things we would do when the children finally left home. It seems insensitive to mention during the Cop26 climate conference that our dream involved taking a diesel camper van right through Europe.
But now, at last, we can do it. Except that something happens to a marriage when it exists in such a busy nest. You can get lost, you can become subsumed. When the last child leaves, it’s just you again. There are suddenly no sibling spats, school trips, exam meltdowns or dating disasters to distract. It’s like that moment in an emptying cinema when the credits start to roll. The parents are the ones picking up the wrappers and cups. Did you like the movie? Is there enough there for a sequel? You have to rediscover the plot of your relationship again. There’s a reason so-called grey divorce (separation among the over-50s) is a phenomenon in itself and numbers have doubled since 1990.
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Susanna gets it. She is being very nice to me. And the big-tech algorithms get it too. They are targeting me with adverts for weekend city breaks and cask-aged whisky deals aplenty. Men don’t though. You won’t catch many admitting how tough the silent house is. But there is plenty of advice that is supposed to alleviate the ache if you ask around. I have a friend who lives in Brighton. Inevitably she’s a bit of a hippy and keeps telling me that my children are like arrows that I am sending into the future. The sturdier and more flexible the bow (that’s me), the higher and further they will travel. I’m sure she’s right. But at the moment I am taking much more comfort in boomerang imagery. I’ve cast my children as firmly to the wind as I can; it’s just that when I’m stacking their old toys, I can’t help wishing they’d come back.
