HayU Blog

Over the past several years, I’ve written a lot about parenting teens and young adults, about the trials of being in the sandwich generation, and about my struggles caring for my aging, ailing mother. My mother passed away nearly two years ago, leaving me parentless, and I dropped off my youngest child to college a month ago, leaving me with an empty nest.  

Now what?

As a business owner, my full work life keeps me from having too much free time. And I’m thrilled to focus my efforts on my side passion of life sculpting and on my neglected body, long overdue for more regular exercise. In just my first few weeks of an empty nest, I’ve joined a gym, gardened more, converted a spare room into a home art studio…. I’m reading and talking on the phone more, my husband and I renewed our season theatre tickets and have actually been having fun cooking new weeknight recipes. I’ve truly entered a new phase and can once again, after decades, focus on myself and my partner.

I miss my parents deeply. And I do feel slightly lost, lonely, and yes, empty, without their love, different from any other love I’ve felt or will feel again.  If I could choose, I would 100% choose to have my parents both here with me for another decade…for as long as I could get.  But I also realize I am blessed, in a sense, to be released from the sandwich generation AND with an empty nest at the relatively young age of 54. I am free to a degree that I did not expect to be until my sixties.  

Do I feel unburdened in a way that feels exciting and footloose? Definitely. But I also feel untethered.  

The house is quiet. I feel unsure of my daily rhythms without having the urgency of an overwhelming, time sensitive tasklist at hand. Just as we teach our executive function coaches at work to do, I’ve all but worked myself out of my job with my own young adult children. As a type A personality, I am used to being a project manager, not only at work, but also in the lives of my children and the lives of my parents when they could no longer manage their own lives. I look left at my coworkers, still in the thick of it with their young children, and then right, at my peers, neck-deep in caregiving of their aging parents.  In my work, I’ve been slowly turning over the reins of daily operations to our staff, mentoring them to take the lead. This has been very rewarding but also leaves me with fewer time-bound tasks and less urgency to my workdays.  I’ve turned to new professional development in college consulting and to increased outreach efforts for the company. 

But the lack of stress at work and at home is weird!  Unsettling, even. How can I be my usual whirling dervish of productivity without the urgency of people needing me? The freedom to even think… “what now?” at any given point in my day, my week, still feels like a shiny new luxury.  The guilty pleasures of reading during daylight hours, of having popcorn and rootbeer for dinner, of gabbing on the phone with a girlfriend for over an hour–these are now mine to enjoy. 

And I’ve earned it after decades of tireless, selfless caregiving…have I not? 

I’m too young to retire.  I’m still too busy with work, nor do I have enough expendable income to travel much more than I already do. Making the effort to enrich my day-in, day-out life, in the little ways that count for a lot, seems like the best way to take advantage of my new freedom and improve my quality of life. 

I recently learned a new term for empty nest: Open Nest.  

I could view my house and calendar and mind as empty. But I prefer to see them as open. Open to new possibilities, more spontaneity, shifted focus.  

An open mindset for my open nest.

Amy Hayutin Contreras

Partner, Hayutin Education