In one month, my oldest daughter, Jacquelyn, will move out of our house and go to college four states away. Regular readers here will know that I have, to put it lightly, struggled with this upcoming change. My daughters and I are very close, and it’s been hard for me to get my head around what life will be like when one kid is gone and the other is off enjoying her driver’s license.
Back when the idea that this change was unavoidable started sinking in, I talked to a friend who had successfully launched one of her kids. “How is it… really?” I asked. “IT’S TERRIBLE!” she replied. “No one talks about what it’s like for parents when kids leave, but it’s heartwrenching. It’s like a divorce but no one feels bad for you.” I’ve never been divorced, but I have a vivid imagination. My hands got clammy even as the sun shone down on our outdoor table.
“How did you handle it?” I asked.
“Xanax. Lots of Xanax.”
“Did that help?” I followed.
“Yes, except for when you get surprised. There are all these little things that you don’t anticipate that come out of nowhere and trip you up. When I got home from moving my kid in at school, I thought I was doing okay. Then one day I found a single, unmatched sock of his in the dryer and everything collapsed. I cried in the fetal position for the entire afternoon.”
After our conversation, I couldn’t help but wonder what nightmare emotional boobytraps around my home were going to leave me crying in the fetal position. That night at dinner, I thought I’d spotted one.
We have a small table in our kitchen where the family eats every meal (unless we take plates onto the porch when the weather is nice). The table has four chairs and our family fills it perfectly when we all sit down together. We cover almost every inch of the table, and I love the closeness I feel with us all eating elbow-to-elbow. But the night I talked with my friend, I came to believe this could be a problem.
“What will it be like having an empty seat between us when Jacquelyn leaves?” I asked my wife. She looked blankly at me for a moment before her eyes filled with tears. “What’s it going to be like when they’re both gone and it’s just you and me at the far ends of the table?” she replied. I felt my own eyes get misty.
I pictured us sitting at the far ends of a stretched table in some ornate Victorian house. “How was your day?” she might ask, to which I would reply from far away “WHAT?? WHAT DID YOU SAY??” and this would be our lives. Our cozy kitchen gathering spot suddenly transformed into a gloomy gothic dining room table where we would have to get up and walk in order to pass the salt.
As you can see, the empty chair is really bothering me. It represents a hole in the tapestry that is my family. It’s a space where something important used to be, but now is beyond our reach.
To combat this feeling, every time I imagine how dinners will feel with just the three of us, I have been comforting myself by remembering that it’ll be years before our youngest child departs. “I’ll acclimate slowly and this will all be fine,” I repeat inside my head. And for a while, that worked pretty well.
Unfortunately, one of the things I’ve learned in life is that the things we dread (if they actually happen) almost never arrive as we have anticipated. I was reminded of this last Sunday after my wife and I dropped our younger daughter off at camp for three weeks. We got home and Jacquelyn announced that she had been put on the work schedule at the restaurant where she’s been training. Her first shift was that night, and we could expect her to be out of the house from 3pm until 11pm for the foreseeable future.
And just like that, my wife and I were alone. In the stifling silence of an empty home, we looked at each other.
“Does this mean it’s… date night?” I asked.
“It doesn’t feel like it,” she replied.
In the past, having the house to ourselves was a reason to celebrate. We could eat the food we wanted, go to the places we wanted, and watch the TV shows we wanted. This freedom, historically, has been a big deal that we’ve gotten fired up about. But tonight, it just felt like the first night of a new normal.
We cooked dinner together and then sat quietly at the far ends of the kitchen table. “How do you think Jacquelyn’s first shift is going?” Alison asked. “I hope she’s loving it,” I responded, and then we both fell back into an awkward silence.
After a few moments I asked my wife, “Do you mind if I come sit next to you?”
“I would like that,” she said.
And so we moved seats.
Since then, I don’t get to sit at the end of the table overlooking the chaos of a family of four. Instead, my wife and I dine next to each other across a corner of the table. We lean in and our elbows almost touch. We tell jokes and laugh. We wonder about how the kids are doing, but we also talk about lots of other things.
The empty chairs don’t look so bad when we’re sitting next to each other. They remind us that we have raised good kids and that they will be home before too long. I know it seems silly, but moving chairs is our way of reprioritizing our relationship in this new stage of life. It doesn’t feel like our family tapestry has two gaping holes in it. Now it just feels like we have a smaller, different but equally beautiful tapestry that will be our lives for at least the next little while.
I’ll miss the idea of sitting at the far end of the table from my wife with our kids filling the space in between us, but what we have sitting next to each other is still quite good. And who knows? Maybe one day we’ll get to have a much bigger table with new faces, booster seats and high chairs, and even dogs that I don’t have to take care of myself!
But for now, I’m just getting used to sitting in a different place at our small table, and I think it’s going to be okay.
