I was devastated when my children left home – but then I started to enjoy it

An empty nest opens up more time for your hobbies and relationships. But how do you maintain those benefits when the children return?

Are you looking down the barrel of the empty nest? Are your beloved children off to university? Or else setting off on a life adventure, sending a two decade-long habit of intensive parenting down the drain?
If so, it’s likely you are feeling discombobulated, sad, stuck with one foot in the past and one in the future. Simultaneously pleased for them, setting out on their big shiny new life, and proud to get them launched, but also wretched with grief and sorrow. 
I’ve felt the grief of it twice. When my eldest went off to college I was ambushed by how much it hurt, and kept having to nip down to the loo and weep. Then last year my baby left – and the nest really was empty. In the weeks before she went we did the ritual trip to Ikea – for pots and pans, a massive 12-point charger (for the phone, the vape, the speaker, the Airpods, the computer, the fairy lights…); a new duvet, sheets, a bedspread and a kettle. The full gamut for setting her up in her new ‘Accom’. Just looking at the boxes made me teary. 
On the way back home, her dad and I wept for the whole M6 Toll. We were still sniffling as we hit the M25. The house felt awfully quiet. As the first few weeks without having her around passed, I realised we had come to the end of a massive life phase. Practically every day for 20 years we had been tending to our kids’ needs. And now the everyday-ness of that was over. It felt as huge a shift as becoming a parent in the first place.
But as the months have gone by, the grief has eased. With both girls gone, time has expanded. The days seem endless, luxuriant. There is so much time for me; for us (me and my long-suffering husband of nearly 30 years); for hanging out with friends; for my work with my online community of midlife women. There is a lot more time to indulge all my passions: cold swimming, writing a book.  But there is also a sense of having several extra arms that are free for other purposes: a little like when I was made redundant from a busy and hectic job and just didn’t know what to do with all the hours I suddenly had in the day.
This empty nest business is another massive midlife change. It has been comforting to talk about it with friends. We share a secret grief. But each of us has confessed different guilty pleasures of having the nest to ourselves: of coming down in the morning and finding the kitchen still tidy, milk still in the fridge. The freedom of not being responsible for anyone is a relief.
Friends further along the road talk of their irritation with their adult kids when they return; the difficulty of finding a new equilibrium. Their offspring reappear expecting the full parental service: laundry, a full fridge, supper on the table. They talk about how wonderful it is to have them back but also how strange it is, how disruptive. The old rules of parent and child no longer apply – they are adults now, used to fending for themselves. But they are back in the family nest. So how do we navigate this?
“It is really important to re-contract when adult children return home,” says Lucy Cavendish, psychotherapist and author of How to Have Extraordinary Relationships. “We retain an innate desire to mother our children whatever our age, whether they want us to or not. Of course when they leave the nest we miss them. We grieve. But then we adjust. We get our lives back. Couples have a chance to reconnect. Or if we are on our own we get used to shopping for one again; it starts off being sad and then becomes liberating. Then when they move back or are home for the long vacation it can be a genuine shock.”
Cavendish says that it is important to “expect friction when your adult children return to the nest” and to establish a “new family contract”. This needs to be done from a place of love. “Begin by saying: ‘I love you, I care about you unconditionally.’ Then: ‘But if we’re going to live together again now that you are used to being an independent adult, we need a new contract.’”
She says she makes it clear that when it comes to her own children she is not going to “shop, fill the fridge and feed them”, or do laundry. “I say I expect them to manage on their budget and to buy food – my kids are 27, 21, 20 and 17. I’ll do more for the youngest, of course, but she is a good cook and does most of that anyway.”  
What Cavendish does do, however, is: “Listen. I support them emotionally, and financially if I can, and I help with practical adult things like getting a passport or helping them fill in tax returns or with getting a job.
“But I don’t do the domestic stuff. Also, I don’t map their iPhones or ask them where they are going or when they will be back. I treat them like trustworthy adults. No more helicopter parenting. It’s none of my business what they are up to.”
Such a new kind of contract isn’t so easy for everyone. “I love it when the kids come home,” says Abigail, 54, who has always been a stay-at-home mum. “It gives me a purpose again. But I find that after a few days they get annoyed with me. They can feel a bit smothered. It’s a huge job creating another human being. It is hard to get the boundaries right. I want to do everything for them and then feel hurt when they don’t want me to anymore. Or when they push me away. I feel like I am always in the wrong.”  
Cavendish is sympathetic. “Moving into this new phase of parenting it is difficult to get the balance right. You need to think about what kind of relationship you want with your adult children. This is an opportunity to reset and rethink. Rather than seeing friction as a disaster, that it means your family is unhappy or you have failed, accept that securely attached people manage difficulty.”
“We don’t all agree constantly. I find the patients who come to me who say they ‘never argue’ are the ones with the real issues. In life, often siblings don’t get along, or different members of the family vie for attention. Sometimes we don’t like our children very much or they don’t like us; we can all behave badly. That is OK. The important thing is to be able to have truthful conversations – to be honest about how you feel and why.
“Try and model good behaviour and take the high ground. Set rules. But also own your flaws. Admit them: for instance I say, ‘Yes I am socially anxious so I can overcompensate…’ It is about having a more adult relationship, so say, yes, I am sorry I hurt you and I see how something I did made you feel and I’ll try not to do it again. Don’t try and fix your children. Just listen to them and reflect back what they have said. It is surprisingly powerful.”
They say that our families are our greatest teachers. It’s true that our kids can push us to the limits, particularly when they are flexing their wings into adulthood. Indeed, if they are to launch themselves into the world and become independent, they probably need to go through a time of feeling their parents are hugely annoying. That is a natural evolution. “I love having my son home now he has finished university,” says Thelma. “But in practical terms it is just not working. He is mainly nocturnal and I have to get up at 7am for work. I drive him mad because I am always coming downstairs cross because he wakes me in the night by playing his music – so he is going to move out.” 
Thelma is lucky that she lives in Manchester where rents are cheaper than some other parts of the UK. Her son has found a flatshare for around £500 a month, which he can manage even on his temp job as a barman. Those of us with kids in the South East can only dream of such an outcome – a room in a shared house in London, for example, can cost £800- £1000. 
“It is much harder for young people to get established now than it was in our day,” warns Cavendish. “It is more difficult to find a job and housing is incredibly expensive, particularly in London.”
When I left university my mother firmly “tipped the nest”; I was told I’d had the best education money could buy and it was time to make my own way in the world. At the time I resented this response, but having to stand on my own two feet, pay my own rent and be in the world meant I knuckled down to a drudgy job and started working my way up through my chosen profession. It was the making of me. These days however, it is a harder call. It’s tough out there for our beloved young adults, so the nest emptying/tipping/shrinking dynamic and decision is trickier. But whether they stay at home or leave, what is clear is that a new family contract is necessary. It should be a renegotiation of the expectations and rules around cohabiting adults; a morphing of the relationship from one of parent to child, to something more equal and nurturing to both. It is yet another important midlife rite of passage. 
Much More To Come by Eleanor Mills (RRP £16.99) is available to pre-order now for £13.99 from The Telegraph Bookshop.
Eleanor is the Founder of Noon.org.uk – home of the Queenager