Eighteen summers ago, my partner and I brought our newborn daughter home from hospital. Exhausted and wired, we felt as though our world had been picked up and put down somewhere else. Last weekend, that same young person left home for university, and the emotional dislocation is back.
Parenthood is one long goodbye, from the child leaving the womb to walking to school alone. But this departure feels palpably different. We're trying to get used to the New Normal: adding an address under her name in our contacts, crossing out a quarter of the shopping list, and wondering if we'll remember these deletions.
Will we cry? Of course we'll cry. We're middle-aged. Will we worry? Of course we'll worry. We're parents. But how will we worry? It's a new variant of worry, perhaps Omicron worry. We rehearse ways of thinking: she's just upstairs, but several hundred miles away. She'll be back at Christmas, but that seems impossibly far off.
Her younger brother now faces a sister-shaped hole in his world. The two have always looked after each other; can they do that on FaceTime? We're a three-person household again, reversing out of parenthood the way we came in. We'll still be parents, but of adult children—a word the English language never bothered to find.
The day after dropping her off, we distracted ourselves at an anthropological museum, confronted by a showcase of spent birds' nests. Ours is not an empty nest; it's just one fledgling lighter. I think about the next time we'll see each other, how we'll notice aging and change, and whether we missed something during our 18-year chance to do it. Life picked up and put down somewhere else. The second act begins.
