Single Mom’s Guide to the Empty Nest

The heartbreak of separation. The longing for contact.  The brief flights of manic optimism about the future.  A love affair gone awry? No, worse – sending your child off to college for the first time.  

Photograph: iStock

• When your daughter looks at you with great amusement and asks if you plan on becoming a cat lady, grow indignant and remind her that last time you checked, you actually had a career, a social life, hobbies.

• Retire to bedroom and close door.  Panic about sorry state of career and social life.  Admit that you have never had a single hobby.

• Consider applying for a sabbatical – a year in Paris, Rome, Vienna.  You’re a free agent now, why not?   Remember at last minute that you are not, in fact, a professor.

• Go to sleep at 9:30pm because there is no one home to make fun of you for it.  Plus,  for the first time you do not have to stay up till 1am wondering how and when  said daughter will be getting home.

• Wake up at 1am anyway.  Refrain from texting daughter asking where she is.  But stay up all night worrying, statistics on teen drinking dancing through your head.

• Date younger men.

• Date older men.

•  Listen to podcast on Buddhism and decide to detach from all want and desire instead.  Practice living in the moment.  Give up and admit that would take serious prescription drugs.  Make a note to call psycho-pharmacologist.

• Decide to make plans instead: Tennis lessons, wine-tasting classes, lectures at the Y, theater tickets, foreign language immersion.  Quickly realize that the only person more over-scheduled than you is an Upper East Side toddler.

• Rejoice that you no longer have to cook a healthy dinner every night.  Eat chocolate fudge brownie ice cream in bed while watching re-runs of Law and Order.  Wash it down with red wine and feel virtuous that you are getting your anti-oxidants.

• Face cold hard fact that if this continues you will weigh 500 pounds.  Vow to eat more healthily. Buy a plethora of locally-grown fruits, vegetables and antibiotic-free lean white meat.  Forget that you are only feeding one.  Throw half of it out a week later.

• Log on to daughter’s college website where there is a live webcam trained on the quad that makes anyone walking by appear to be a worker ant.   Wonder if one of those ants is your daughter. When someone at work catches you at this for the, oh, fifteenth time, explain that you are doing wild life research.  Make a note to close office door before sixteenth time.

• Get a life.

Day 4: The future looks bright – except when it doesn’t

Day 4
My daughter loves every school, big and small, rural and urban. She is either very open-minded and optimistic – or completely indecisive. I can’t decide which. At 11pm, she climbs onto my bed. Despite a grueling day, her eyes are bright, excited. “Mom, maybe I shouldn’t say this. I know you’ll miss me, but I can’t wait to go to college. The classes sound amazing. I even like the word ‘Professor.’” I smile. She is picturing various iterations of what her life might be with each campus we visit, a young woman truly on the brink, with so much yet to come, so much yet to be decided. It makes me deeply happy. I know that sadness, emptiness will come, but it is incredibly gratifying to see her enthusiasm for the life that is about to unfold. For all the mistakes, I must have done something right.
Of course, ten minutes later comes the buzz-kill: She snaps out of her happy trance and turns to me with dramatic concern: “Your life is going to be pathetic when I’m gone. I mean, what are you going to do?” she asks. I can’t help but laugh – and be slightly annoyed. I am a single mother and I date, I go out with friends, I have a life, thank you very much. “Par-tay!” I reply. She looks at me as if I am an alien creature. I feel no need to confide a recent dream: I was holding a blonde infant (much like my daughter) but when I looked again she had morphed into a cat. I woke in a panic: Is this my future, turning into a cat lady??? “Par-tay!” I repeat, though I’m not quite sure who I’m trying hardest to convince. Still, I believe the future is wide-open for both of us.

Day Two – The Monsoon

Day Two
Providence, R.I.
We wake up to a monsoon. This is no exaggeration. Within 24 hours, a state of emergency will be declared as rivers flood and roads are shut. Between the four of us we have exactly one umbrella. Nevertheless, the touring must go on. We huddle as we make our way to the car. Okay, the moms huddle – we are bigger, older, and have hair issues. Our daughters, needless to say, are not amused. We join at least 50 other people at the first college, Brown, where we trudge through puddles that looks suspiciously like lakes. Nevertheless, the tour is packed. It’s spring break and every junior on the east coast is touring. And, it seems, every junior on the east coast wants to go to Brown. Hell, I wanted to go to Brown. I joke to my daughter that we are visiting every college that rejected me. She looks at me skeptically, hoping this is not an inherited trait along with my inability to carry a tune. I’m not worried. She is smarter, a better student and more ambitious than I was at her age. I had, uh, other interests. She is, though, very forgetful, and has left her medication at home. I spend half the day trying to track down her doctor to call a refill in to a local pharmacy. It appears the 60-something doctor is also on Spring Break – in the Bahamas. My daughter cannot understand why I am upset. “At least it wasn’t my cell phone,” she says.

Road Trip Day One

Day One
How to take 7 hours to make a 4 hours trip:
After fighting for 45 minutes with the people at Hertz- who seem to have a different definition of ‘reserved” and ‘confirmed’ than we do- we finally settled for a car we hadn’t wanted and left in a righteous huff – only to be called 45 minutes later to say we had left a suitcase and hard to turn around. Two hours later – finally making some progress – we pull off for coffee and see signs for an Estate Sale. Tempting. We drive in circles (and more circles) and finally give up. (Greek teen chorus in the back: Why do you want to buy things from dead people?) But we have been bitten by the shopping bug. How lucky that an hour later we see a big outlet center. The shopping gods are with us! All four of us score big time: Sunglasses, bags, tops. A mere two hour delay. (We won’t mention the cost of all that bargain shopping.) We call the hotel: You know our 3pm check in? Not so much. Finally, at 8:30pm, after dinner, wine and a huge sigh of relief we check in.

2 moms, 2 teens, 1 car, 6 colleges, 7 nights: Road Trip Pre–Planning Session:

Finally booked 6 hotels for the upcoming week-long college road tour.  Spent untold hours trying to balance proximity to campuses, room availability and sliding scale between skeeve and luxe.  I was expecting to feel the love, but only topic of interest to all other concerned parties: Not Ivy vs Non-Ivy, Small vs Large but…road food.  My daughter looked at the itinerary and asked one question: “Can we stop at Costco on the way out of town?”  This from a city girl who has never been to a Costco in her life.  When I asked why she replied that she and her co-teen-traveler, A., want to stock up on king-size bags of junk food for the trip. I pointed out that: 1. We are not exactly going into the desert. I’m sure they have junk food in Providence, Hanover etc.  And 2. King-size bags of junk food?!?!?! Are you kidding me? Then called other mother to go over itinerary and her first response: “I know the best place to get fried chicken in Saratoga Springs!”   Needless to say, no one seemed at all impressed – or even interested – that I had managed to book at least 3 hotels with gyms and indoor pools.  And my advice to bring sneakers? Eye-rolling all around. Do they sell wine at Costco??