Finding Joy in the Empty Nest: Reinventing Yourself & Winning in the Second Half

“It’s time to create new habits and new adventures with less clutter.” The people who make a successful transition to the empty nest embrace new habits, form new routines, refresh their goals, and find new purpose: they reinvent or recalibrate their lives. Your entire life might not change, but in the empty nest, you have been given back hours of your day and weeks that were once focused on the kids. Now is the perfect time to make some course corrections. Those who adapt to the change and adjust their mindsets are the ones who thrive in a new relationship with their kids as well as embrace new rituals, routines, and adventures. While some empty nesters get stuck focusing on the past, several considerations can help you move forward with a fresh start and renewed vision. One of the strongest reasons entering the empty nest hits people so hard is because they did not prepare for this new phase of life, and it bites them. That was Cathy’s and my experience. We were living by circumstance and chance. After we had maintained a breathless pace with our kids in the chaos of the teenage years, the silence of the empty nest was forced on us, and we were not ready. The smell of fresh linens, a full refrigerator, the TV remote found where we left it, and even the toilet seat closed didn’t seem to give us comfort. Instead, the silence screamed, “What now?!”

Here is a short list of benefits of the empty nest compiled from our focus groups. Undoubtedly you will be able to add many more to it: 2. Your kids come back to visit, and you can schedule regular times to connect. 7. You can move forward with things that were on the back burner. 10. You can enjoy your grandchildren and then hand them back.

My son-in-law is a pilot. I remember when he first went to flight school. He said the landings were a bit wobbly and sometimes a little bumpy. Over the years, landing the plane became second nature. Most of the landings were silky smooth. Sure, occasionally the air gets choppy, and the landing can still be rough, but time and practice make the landings much better. It’s the same in your new relationship with your adult children. As you reinvent the relationship from parent-child to adult-adult, you’ll encounter some bumps in the road. But when you hand them the passport to adulthood, treating them as adults without offering unsolicited advice or enabling them, they eventually get past the awkward years and become responsible adults. This is especially true if we live by the thought at the beginning of this chapter: “It’s really not about you anymore. As he makes the shift to adulthood, he won’t need to see you as much as you want to see him.” And if you’re like most empty nesters, what really helps with reinventing your relationship with your adult kids is doing a little reinventing yourself. That can make the empty nest so much more enjoyable.