There’s a bird’s nest tucked into the wreath on my front door. Five baby birds hatched there just a few days ago. This is actually the second nest this spring. That same wreath held eggs back in May too, right around the time my boys were coming home for the summer. I keep wondering why this particular spot, in this particular season, keeps filling up again and again. My mother loved watching birds at her feeders, at her house and at mine. Maybe that’s how nature works in early summer. Maybe it’s something more.
What Does Empty Nest Syndrome Actually Feel Like?
If you’re searching for empty nest syndrome symptoms and feelings, here’s the plain answer. It’s a wave of grief, restlessness, and identity loss that can show up when children leave home, even though it isn’t an official medical diagnosis. For some women it feels like sadness. For others it feels like losing a sense of purpose, or strangely, like relief. Most of us feel some mix of all three at once.
I will be honest with you. I can’t say I’m living through empty nest syndrome right now. My oldest just graduated and moved back home to start his career, and my youngest is heading into his senior year of college. They’re in and out, back and forth, never fully gone but never fully here either. What I feel most right now is the anticipation of it, the knowledge that someday this nest really will be empty, the way mine was once before.
What It Felt Like When Mine Actually Emptied
That before is worth talking about, because it’s where the real syndrome lives. My kids left for college within a short stretch of losing my mother and my dog. The empty hit all at once, and it hit hard. For years you live inside the activity, the schedules, the purpose, the constant being needed. You’re loved, tired, excited, sometimes running on no sleep at all, and somehow that becomes your normal. Then it changes, often faster than you’re ready for.
Eventually you settle into the quiet and build a new routine, but it’s never quite without thought of what used to fill that space. I still picture little hands and feet bopping around the house. I still remember the paws that used to follow me across the kitchen floor while I cooked. I was lucky to have all of it for as long as I did, and the missing part can still hurt even after the routine returns.
Is It Normal to Grieve a Season That Hasn’t Fully Ended?
Empty nest syndrome isn’t an official diagnosis in the manual doctors use to diagnose mental health conditions. But that doesn’t make it any less real. It’s something therapists and researchers write about all the time, and for good reason. For some women, the quiet that follows is a relief they’ve been waiting years for. For others, myself included, it was genuinely difficult, and not just for a day or a week. It lasted a while.
If any of this sounds familiar, you’re allowed to grieve a season that hasn’t fully ended yet. This kind of loss doesn’t always get treated like loss, because nothing tragic happened and you physically didn’t lose them. It just…changed. If you want language for that specific kind of ambiguous grief, Megan Devine’s book It’s OK That You’re Not OK has helped me put words to feelings I didn’t know how to name.
This whole season, this kind of difficult transition, is exactly why I created When A Season Ends. Nobody tells you about this part, the in between time that’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it. It’s a free guide for women navigating exactly that, and if this post is resonating with you, you can grab it here.
Nobody tells you about this part.
When a Season Ends is a FREE reflection guide for women navigating loss, change, and the season that comes after.
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The Nest Doesn’t Always Empty Once and Stay That Way
Empty nest syndrome doesn’t always arrive once and stay. For me it eased, then the kids came home in spurts and things got better again, then they left and the quiet returned. It’s less a single moment and more a tide that comes in and goes back out, especially in those first few years after college starts.
Right now I’m somewhere in that tide, between one season and the next. Someday my sons will really fly from this nest. They’ll build their own families and carry their own responsibilities, the way they’re supposed to. It was my job to prepare them for exactly that, and I did it on purpose. Accepting that it’s actually happening is a different thing entirely. Time moves quickly once you notice it moving at all.
I wrote about an earlier version of this feeling in Rethinking The Empty Nest, back when the realization was still brand new to me. Reading it now feels like checking in on an old friend who’s come a long way since then.
One Small Thing That Helps
If you’re standing in any part of this season yourself, whether it’s the anticipation or the middle of it or the quiet after, you don’t need a five step plan today. You need one small thing that reminds you you’re still moving forward. That’s the whole idea behind Your Plan For Today, a simple way to figure out what actually matters on the day you’re having, whatever kind of day that is.
The Nest Will Always Be Ready
The nest in my wreath will empty again soon enough. The birds will fly and the space will sit quiet for a little while, until it doesn’t anymore. My own nest will go through that too, more permanently, when the time actually comes. But here’s what I know for certain. The nest will always be there for them, and I’ll keep it ready, always.
