Kelly Corrigan’s Empty Nester Advice Is Mending My Broken Heart
There is that moment when you walk out of the hospital with your newborn in a car seat and you think — why are they letting me do this? How can this be legal? As crazy as that milestone felt for me, it felt equally surreal to drop that same child at an apartment building, at age 18, to begin a new life apart from me.
My husband and I didn’t cry on the way home. We were struck dumb. Our younger son was still in his room, hiding under a blanket and heartbroken that he lost his only sibling to the “real world.” Just as there are few words that can express the sea change that parenthood brings, it’s hard to talk about the seismic shift that occurs anytime a kid leaves home and the headcount in your house goes down one.
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That was our first goodbye. Now both kids have left. We have the proverbial empty nest. It is brutal, and fantastic, just like their babyhood. In trying to process my emotions, I re-listened to Kelly Corrigan on an episode of her podcast Kelly Corrigan Wonders called “Getting Real About the Empty Nest.” Corrigan is a breast-cancer survivor who wrote the New York Times bestselling memoir The Middle Place and hosts the PBS interview show Tell Me More. Her painful day dropping her youngest child mirrored mine in many ways. But I also understand how happy she is to now have a lighter mental load. What kids eat and whether their clothes are clean are not a parent’s problem once kids leave home.
Corrigan also wrote a brilliant New York Times essay called How to Let Go of Your Irreplaceable, Unstoppable Daughter about seeing an adult child off into the world, and I could relate to the essay, too. Like Corrigan and her husband, our youngest had pandemic high school years. We had too much together time. When he got into his dream school, and made friends and even a girlfriend over the college Discord channel, everything worked out perfectly. I was thrilled for him. So why did it still sting to hug him, choke out, ““I am so proud of you,” then turn and walk away?
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“Today is the end of it,” Corrigan remembers thinking, explaining on the podcast the “total nervous breakdown” she had before moving her youngest into a dorm. In her essay she says that she later had this epiphany: She’s not yours. And the truth is, she never was.
“I’m just a person who’s crazy about [them],” is what she thinks now about her daughters. “But I’m not a parent in the way I previously defined it. I’m not responsible for [them]. I’m on standby. I’m [their] emergency contact.”
Corrigan admits, though, that leaving one’s kids is easier mentally than emotionally. It’s one thing to say “I’m done!” and another to feel it. Because it hurts. And it all keeps being weird, as Corrigan points out and I can confirm, because people ask all the time, “How are your kids?” All you have to go by are their short texts, or Instagram posts that you’re allowed to stalk. It’s a far cry from the toddler years, when you could recite everything that went into and out of their body and how long they slept and what they played with that day.
Which brings me to the fantastic part of the empty nest. The freedom! The not preparing meals. The sleeping in! My husband and I travel, work, see friends and family. No matter where we are, we do the New York Times Spelling Bee over breakfast. Corrigan says that the empty nest is not a time that people necessarily envision. It just happens. “This is a time to move your focus,” Corrigan says on the podcast. “I rotate my field of vision away from [my kids] to the people in my life now who can make use of me,” whether that’s coworkers or friends or elderly parents or a spouse. But, she says, her kids are always in her thoughts, even if she has no idea what they are doing on any given day.
“My new agenda is emotional autonomy,” Corrigan told Flow in a recent interview. “I want to learn how to detach from the highs and lows of my kids’ lives. Still love them madly, still be useful when possible, but not ride the rollercoaster.”
Here are a few of Corrigan’s empty-nest takeaways, outlined at the end of the podcast:
Finding empty nesting painful doesn’t mean that you don’t have ideas of your own on how to spend this next life stage. You’re just clear-headed enough to know that something has ended, and it will not come again.
One of the greatest empty-nest adjustments is accepting knowing less about your children, from their friendships to their wellbeing.
Give adult kids space. Don’t text every day.
It’s easier to let our kids go if they have developed a true, sustaining friendship with at least one other person, be it a sibling or a peer. It should not be you.
Being loved but not needed by your kid is magnificent.
We asked if Corrigan had any final words of wisdom to parents who, like me, can barely walk in their child’s bedroom without feeling somber. (Shouldn’t they be there, yelling for me to get out?) “When you can’t think of anything else but what’s passed, turn your attention to the world and look more closely,” Corrigan says. “It’s vast and fascinating and waiting for our participation. Get smaller in the frame. Include a broader set of ideas and concerns. That’s what I’m telling myself these days. That’s what I’m trying to practice.”
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