One and Done Empty Nesters

  Now that I am actually in midlife, I realize that " midlife crisis " is really not the right term. Whomever coined that probably wasn't in midlife yet. It was probably a 30-something who saw their 55-year-old mom decide to quit her job and go back to school to get a degree in an entirely different field. This may have looked like a crisis to the grown child, but Mom was probably happy as a lark.  I have gone through these changes of heart, too, but always found them to be positive adventures, never a "crisis" with its negative connotation. I did go back to school at age 52 to start my master's, which I will finish at age 56 (two classes to go!) It has been exciting and fun and fulfilling. No crisis here. So when I bought a two-seater convertible a year ago, I realized that this is what my younger self would have called a midlife crisis car. But now I know it is actually a midlife-just-for-me car. Shhhh, maybe we should still call it a midlife crisis car so...

My husband, Mark, and I took what may have been our first ever camping trip together without our daughter or other family members in 29 years of marriage. Honestly, it's been so long we really can't remember, the way life before kids is hard to remember. Before our one-and-only Mia was born almost 19 years ago, we did some amazing camping trips with Mark's family and other groups in places like Nova Scotia and the Grand Canyon. Later, with Mia and both our families, we camped in Yellowstone and Redwoods national parks. The three of us have camped on Cumberland Island and in the mountains of northern Georgia.  During the pandemic just Mark and I camped on our back deck a couple times, but Mia was home so those don't count. We mainly did that out of boredom because we had hardly left the house in two months, but it actually was really fun.  Mark spent a week of every month for a whole year camping by himself in national parks for a beautiful book he wrote called Lassoing ...

  Even though I live in Florida, I grew up in the Midwest and love fall. My birthday is right after Halloween, which probably has something to do with my love of that holiday (friends always gave me some of their candy for my birthday). I liked being in school with my friends, I liked playing soccer, I loved the color of the trees. And I loved carving pumpkins. This is not quite how my husband saw the season. He had a scary experience as a kid on Halloween, he lived in Wisconsin and knew the long winter was around the corner, and he had no affinity for carving pumpkins. So it was up to me to establish the fall traditions in our house. And one of my favorites was our annual family trip to the same pumpkin patch every year starting with my daughter's first fall season when she wasn't even a year old yet. The weather was always beautiful, we'd often see old neighbors, and we'd take a family picture on the same bench. For 18 years. Then it hit me the other day - my daughter...

We just got back from our first official empty nester vacation. Here's what I learned: 1. It is really quiet. Too quiet. It was just my husband and me in a rental house. There is nothing wrong with quiet, but if you're not used to it, it's a bit unsettling. I need to work on being OK with the quiet. 2. You can get the good bread. There's nothing better than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while hiking. But when we vacation with kids, we end up buying a loaf of white bread for the picky eaters. It was nice to get the good stuff this time.  3. No one is getting queasy in the back seat. Lots of windy roads and we didn't have to stop once.  4. You can hike to high vistas. Our daughter really doesn't like heights. At one point on a hike, my husband and I had the same thought: Mia wouldn't have liked this. But on our own, we got to enjoy a beautiful vista! 5. You can take detours. Usually we are rushing to get back home for school, or an activity, or a birthda...

My one-and-only came home for her first visit!  I got a chuckle out of the stereotypical large bag of laundry she brought with her. She didn't ask me to do her wash, but I happily volunteered (I draw the line at folding, however).     It was nice to hear her footsteps in the house again. I was reminded how late she sleeps (wake up and play with me!) Still, we got lots of quality time. The three of us worked on a puzzle for a while until we all got frustrated. My husband looked forward to watching her school's football game with her - but she went to her boyfriend/not-boyfriend's house to watch it instead (she didn't realize Dad wanted to watch the game with her, and he didn't tell her). But she came home during the fourth quarter and we all enjoyed watching them win, together. As we worked on the aforementioned puzzle, my husband played Camila Cabella's song First Man on Spotify. In the song, she tells her father he is the first man who loved her. We've lis...

           Image by DreamersNight   We feel like we have a ghost living with us. OK, it's only been three weeks since we dropped our one-and-only child, Mia, off for her freshman year of college. But I still find myself quickly turning off my alarm clock in the morning so it doesn't wake her up, or expecting her to burst through the door talking to me loudly at full speed without noticing that I'm on a work call. I also find myself wondering whether she is going to like the dinner I'm fixing tonight (probably not). My husband, Mark, watches out for her car when he's backing out of the driveway, forgetting it's not there, and has caught himself looking for her in her room.  We both expect to be awakened in the middle of the night when she very loudly gets up to go to the bathroom. I hope she has learned to be quieter for her roommates. In other words, the ghost of our daughter is still living with us. That idea of dropping off our kid at ...

"You sent your only child off to college in the middle of a pandemic?!"  This is one of the questions/comments/insinuated looks I've gotten from people in the past few weeks, as no doubt many of you with college kids have, too.  Those of us with kids in college, especially who have become new empty nesters in a pandemic, have a different perspective.  For one, we know that our kids are likely to be more protected on campus than running around their hometown. My daughter is smart and responsible, but she can be swayed by peer pressure to not wear a mask or social distance. At school, they are required to wear masks inside and out on campus, and she is living on campus where there are lots of restrictions due to COVID-19 (and frequent cleaning!)  Most classes are online, but the ones that are in person take many precautions (I would post a photo of my daughter in the ridiculously large "singing" mask that they are required to wear in her vocal class but I won'...