the unspoken grief of a parent’s life after kids

The day after my 22-year-old ­daughter, Mia, left home, about six months ago, I sat on the couch, looking out at our backyard. It was Saturday. Outside, the grass throbbed greenly. The ­frangipanis glowed pink. The sky was cloudless and blue. It was truly a spectacular day.

And I thought: Everything’s f—ed.

When you have kids, everyone tells you how tired you’re going to be and how many nappies you’re going to have to change. Better book your kids into daycare now. School, too. You gotta get a car seat, and a really good pram. If you don’t spend at least $800 on your pram, then you obviously don’t value your child’s life.

But there’s stuff that people don’t tell you, or certainly not overtly. They don’t tell you how profoundly and incomparably beautiful having kids would be, how it would open a door onto a previously unimaginable world, alive with the deepest wonders and rewards. Another thing they don’t tell you is how devastating it will be when your kids grow up and leave. How, ­despite the fact that you knew it was coming, it’d still feel like an ambush. No one touched on that. Or maybe they did, and I wasn’t listening. In any case, there I was, sitting on the couch one sunny Saturday with one less daughter in the house, feeling like all the best bits of my life were over and wondering what the point was.

Like I said. Everything was f—ed.

It wasn’t like we hadn’t been here before. A year earlier, another daughter, our 18-year-old, Rosey (my wife and I have three girls), had left home to go uni in Canberra, abandoning us like a pile of emotional trash, albeit one with a Netflix account she would log onto remotely.

It took me a good six months to deal with that, with the fact that she’d had the temerity to grow up, develop autonomy, and pursue her own life. The unjustness of it. I would stare for 10 minutes at a time at the portrait of Rosey, stuck to the wall of my office at home. My wife and I would lie in bed at night, getting morose, crying quietly.

We would visit Rosey on weekends, driving down to Canberra, resisting the temptation to speed all the way. The current consensus is that Canberra is a cool place now, and Rosey certainly talked about how much fun she was having. But to a person from Sydney, which has hills and water and other distinguishing geographical features, everything there looked the same. I always felt lost, which was an excellent metaphor for my ­emotional state.

After a while I thought I’d settled into our new reality. I had processed it, as they say. But then, just as I was getting back to something approaching normal … another daughter left home. And I realised I hadn’t processed anything at all.

I know. It’s not that big a deal, right? It’s not like they’re dead. It goes without saying that the pain you feel when your kids leave home must be barely one-millionth of what you’d feel had they died. But still, it hurts. There’s no denying that. Part of the challenge was that I was hurting in ways that were new to me, and therefore confusing. I was happy that the girls were happy, but there was such a dissonance between their excitement about moving out and my pain at them leaving that at times I felt almost wobbly, like I was being buffeted by a wind only I could feel.

Mia had moved into a tiny terrace in Surry Hills with two other girls. Her room was ­upstairs. One weekend, my wife and I drove over to help her move in. I carried a cupboard up to her bedroom. The stairs were narrow and steep. With every step, I swear that cupboard got heavier and heavier, filling up with all the things I didn’t want to let go of; namely, Mia’s childhood, the tens of thousands of tiny moments, all the nameless raptures and frustrations; the 3am bottle-feeds, the endless spoonfuls of mashed banana, her sleeping on my chest in bed. Standing on the sidelines watching her play netball. (Realising, contrary to expectations, that netball is actually a great game to watch.) Surfing together. Swimming with dolphins. Changing her nappy on the back seat of the car on the side of a dark country road with trucks flying past a foot from the window.

The hurt I felt from Mia leaving now combined with the deferred pain I felt over Rosey. Their childhoods now seemed both incredibly distant and startlingly close. I remembered ­taking them to the dentist. Buying their school shoes. At the time, that seemed like such a drag. But I’d give anything now to be back in that shoe shop. Taking them there was my responsibility. They needed me. No one will need me like that, ever again. I accept they will need me in other ways, as adults, to ask about fixed-rate mortgages or health insurance. But they will never need me like they needed me then.

That was all done now.

This sounds obvious, but the house gets a lot quieter when your kids leave home. It’s boring. When they were at home, our daughters were always darting about, like tropical fish, in the corner of my eye. Rummaging in the fridge, clanging cutlery; putting together an acai bowl or cooking pasta. Coming and going with their friends. You’d hear their voices, filtering down the hallway. They would counsel one another when they were upset, and fight about who stole which item of clothing from whom. I loved these sounds, because my wife and I had raised three sisters, and that’s what sisters do.

Now it all seems so still. Our youngest girl, the 16-year-old, Sunny, is still at home, thank god. But she’s growing up as well. It’s all I can do not to nail her feet to the floor and put extra locks on the doors. I find myself getting needy: I’m almost willing to pay her for extra hugs. At times, when she’s out with her friends, I’ve found myself standing, stock still, in the ­kitchen, staring straight ahead. It’s like I’ve been marooned on an ­island, all by myself. Which is terrifying, because I’m literally the last person I would want to be left alone with.

The post was saying that I could have more freedom. But I didn’t want freedom … I wanted my daughters.

These feelings are all part of what they call “empty nester syndrome” (ENS). It’s ­impossible to say how common it is: I’ve read that everything from 25 per cent to 98 per cent of parents go through it, but there isn’t much ­research and the studies aren’t exactly ­authoritative. Besides, what qualifies as ENS? When I looked online, I read about parents who couldn’t go into their kid’s bedroom for a month after they left (I related to that one), and parents whose marriages fell apart. Other empty nesters reported feeling a bit out of sorts for a week or so, but it wasn’t anything a week in Bali couldn’t fix.

The advice about how to deal with ENS is always the same: get a hobby, see friends … And there are plenty of dedicated ENS Instagram accounts. One day, my wife sent me a post from an account called Life.afterkids, which has 445,000 followers. The post showed a middle-aged woman in casual clothes, ­walking, with her back to the camera, along a beach. The implication seemed to be that she was walking away from her previous life. The caption read: “The hurt we feel over saying goodbye to our kids’ childhoods [is] balanced by the freedom to live life as we choose.”

I loved my wife for sending me this, but it didn’t help much. The post was saying that I could have more freedom. But I didn’t want freedom. I couldn’t care less about freedom. I wanted my daughters. It was like being offered lobster when what you wanted more than ­anything was an apple.

I thought maybe it was a gender thing. Some of my mates were also having kids leave home, but they didn’t seem so freaked out. I’d ­sometimes look at them, and wonder: are they hiding it? But whenever I mentioned it to them, they seemed nonplussed. One mate told me, “Don’t worry, they’ll come back,” which seemed to miss the point. Was I the weird one? Maybe I just needed to man up, enjoy all that awesome freedom.

Woo-hoo.

One day, I was working at home. I was in the middle of a Zoom call when I felt something inside me giving way, like a mudslide in my chest. I made some excuse, walked out of the room and stood in the hallway, out of sight, crying. Then, after a minute or two, I blew my nose, cleaned myself up, and went back to the Zoom call.

Because I’m paranoid and neurotic, my daughters’ departures set loose a bunch of ­associated fears, like chimps escaping the zoo. How will they cope? Will the world chew them up? Will they get a job? Will they fall in love? If they do, what’ll happen when they break up? It’s absurd: they’re adults, for Christ’s sake. But still. The world’s a gnarly place.

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It would be bad enough if it were just their physical absence. But that absence reframes everything. For some people, kids can be a ­reason to stay together. Once they’re gone, it’s not uncommon for couples to look at one ­another and say: why you? A world of terrifying possibilities can open up. Separation. Single life. Even the idea of all that freedom can be terrifying. Freedom means having to make choices, and I’m terrible with choices, because I tend to assume I’ll make the wrong one.

But here’s the thing. I haven’t always been terrible at making choices. In fact, as I now ­realise, having kids was, in itself, a pretty radical choice, one that led to an epic adventure. The next adventure is just hoving into view, like a ship on the horizon. When it pulls up, I’ll hop aboard, grab a good strong drink, and make myself at home. Destination: I’ve got no idea.

Anyway, our parenting isn’t over yet. We’ve still got Sunny. She’s a deep thinker with a silly streak; gets lost for hours in drawing and music. A dark horse. One day recently, she walked into the kitchen. My wife and I were just standing there, as you do. She walked across and hugged her mother, and then hugged me. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m going to be here for years to come.” Then, with much clanging and banging of pots and pans, she began cooking herself a big bowl of pasta.

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