When our teenage daughter finally left home, my wife and I stopped eating vegetables. Not permanently, but there was a good, month-long stretch when we’d make pasta and no salad, chicken and no carrots, meatloaf and no beans.

Which led to another development as newly-minted “empty nesters”—we starting eating out more. After all, that’s where the vegetables were. We noticed after the first few months that we started meeting for lunch more often and going out to dinner, sometimes twice a week. We noticed it first in our bank account, but we justified the expense by noting how much less we were spending on groceries.

We are two moms to one child, Anneliese, but our grocery bills have been cut in half. I think it mostly has to do with the fact that we routinely also fed her boyfriends. Eating out used to be something we did as a couple about twice a month, when we learned last minute on a Friday afternoon that Anneliese had a sleepover. Sometimes, we’d occasionally steal away for a lunch on a workday before she got out of school. 

Anneliese has been threatening to leave home since she was 13, the byproduct of a common mix of rebellion and boredom. But as her eighteenth birthday loomed just after Thanksgiving, we knew it was going to become much more than a threat. For the month of November, my wife, Sarah, was in mourning. She was depressed, and sad. She knew it was coming, and it was her way of preparing herself. I, on the other hand, was the soothsayer. “It’s going to be okay,” I’d say. “She’ll always be our daughter and she’ll always have home to come back to.” 

That dynamic worked out nicely for Sarah because she had done the hard work, and when Anneliese actually left home two months later, I was the one who was apoplectic.

“What is she doing?!!” I cried. “What is she going to do about school?!! What is she possibly thinking?!!” and Sarah was the soothsayer and would say, “Let’s just take it one day at a time.” A cliché, yes, but she was right. That was all we could do, because we still had to get up every day and go to work and take care of the dogs and the house and pay bills and be grown-ups. 

Anneliese is the kind of kid who’s always had her own way of doing things. She would half-listen to your much more practical suggestions, nod, then do it her way. Yelling at her would get you nowhere except further away. While I value her independence, her stridency and her passion, it has taken me years to accept that she is who she is and will do what she wants, for that is how she learns. We now must trust that we raised her right, and that she will go off into the world knowing right from wrong, the value of hard work, and importance of honesty and accountability. She doesn’t drink, she’s not on drugs, she’s working, going to school and not asking for money. That’s what I call an upside. 

That said, living with someone like that through her high school years and then suddenly having her leave is a big adjustment. She’s 18; it’s adult time. This is what she wants, and we cannot legally stop her. Smell that? It smells like freedom from teen spirit. Although I didn’t stop caring about Anneliese and loving her, I felt like a portion of my brain had been freed up to concentrate on other things. 

Then we started noticing the not-so-subtle differences in our house, and in our lives. There was less clutter and more hot water. Sarah’s make-up was where she left it. With all of the beauty products out of the shower, the bathroom seemed to double in size. It was quiet, and much … less … stressful. 

It was about six weeks in when the swimmy, strange feeling of adjustment started to give way to something else: We had time. We had time to ourselves, and a lot of it. That’s why we started going out to eat so much. We started spending more time together, just hanging out. And because Sarah is a labor and delivery nurse on the night shift, we also started spending more time by ourselves. I suddenly had a lot more time to write, to read, to go to the gym, to work on the house. Sarah started hanging out more often with nurses from work. She took up snowshoeing, and I did more skiing this winter than I have in a long time. 

But after about three months, Sarah confessed that she was having trouble figuring out who she is now that Anneliese is gone. She was 19 years old when Anneliese was born. “I have spent my whole life concentrating really hard on this child,” she said. She wanted to have more time to herself so she could work on this identity crisis she was having and try to re-imagine herself going forward. I got upset. I thought she was subtly telling me she wanted a divorce, to live separate lives. She assured me that was not the case. 

I spent the next week or so checking in but at the same time being overly accommodating about Sarah’s space and time. “After you wake up, we could go to the gym together,” I’d say, then I’d remember. “Or not. If you need time to yourself, that’s fine. No problem.” And she would smile and stroke my cheek and say, “Oh, Honey, it’s fine. Let’s do that.” 

Another week went by, and then, an affirmation and an understanding. I was listening to a radio program and there was an author talking about her book about her divorce. She said she “read” her way through her divorce, and at one point was reading Rainier Maria Rilke. She said he wrote that two people must have profound respect for each other’s solitude, and that if that does not exist, the marriage is doomed to co-dependency. 

I had gone to the store to buy dog food and was sitting in my truck when I heard this, and suddenly, I knew we would be okay. For us, the hardest thing about being empty nesters is not just the loss of a child, but what we do with that, and with each other, going forward. And although we do have respect for each other’s solitude, we have started eating vegetables again, together.