I come into the kitchen to find my husband staring into space, which is normally my job. Then he points. “It’s time to accept we aren’t bread-bin people,” he says.
I believe, instinctively, ancestrally, in bread bins; I come from bread-bin stock. But since we acquired ours five years ago, it has been used probably five times. On one of these occasions, a loaf was left in there for so long that the buildup of mould caused the lid to warp. I assumed the problem was living with teenagers with no object permanence, who, even if they saw the bread go in, forgot it existed once it was no longer visible. However, after two years of an empty nest, bread still lives on top of the bin. It turns out that even I am not a bread-bin person.
Our younger son just turned 21, meaning we are a childless household in every official sense of the term. It is and isn’t how I expected it would be. The bread bin is just one of my empty-nest surprises; here are some others.
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I am actually very tidy – indeed, unpleasantly uptight about tidiness. It was the eternal churn of family mess that made me a slattern.
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We are now a Nando’s-free household after years of peri-peri tyranny, but I find myself pining for “macho peas” and pallid, lukewarm chips. Is it the flabby fries or the slack, companionable comfort of those four-on-the-sofa TV dinners I want? My husband suggested getting a small, elegant sofa recently, but the idea of never squashing the four of us on to ours again made me unspeakably sad.
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I don’t want a dog. It has been 18 months since my beloved dog Oscar died. Empty nesters always get dogs, but I don’t want to nurture anything more demanding than our roster of surrogate children (idiot hens, an infant tortoise and Susan, the fugitive wedding dove on our roof who arrived eight months ago, but still won’t let me touch her).
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If we don’t do a weekly food shop, nothing falls apart and no one perishes.
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Escaping the parenting trenches before most of my peers means I socialise a lot with older people – and, oof, their energy! Does your life force gradually replenish until you can bounce through pilates, Zumba and five-a-side, volunteer for multiple charities, learn the harpsichord and improve your Arabic? When does that start, please?
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Life feels blissfully easy day to day (less laundry, more leisure) and existentially confusing. I feel as tied to my sons as ever, but also cut off, teetering between overbearing interference and strenuously pretending to be casual, constantly second-guessing whether I should ask how the exam went, if they slept, whether the sun is shining where they are. Reading Nina Stibbe’s latest diaries I was envious at how happily enmeshed she is in her grownup children’s lives.
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It’s cringey how much I miss them. Sometimes, I catch myself staring jealously over my husband’s shoulder at a WhatsApp from one of them; I regularly check the weather where they live; when they Deliveroo on my account, I spy on their orders.
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It’s also annoying when they come home, wilfully misunderstanding the recycling system, eating at inconvenient times and using towels like oligarchs. Just as I adjust and relax, they leave again.
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I thought I would work harder when they left, become a single-minded art monster. Instead, I feel fallow, like my brain used itself up producing this crop of offspring and needs a year (or five) off. It’s unnerving. I read a lot about the creative power of idleness to try to reassure myself.
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It’s no surprise to remember how much I like my husband’s company, but it’s astonishing to realise we only cohabited for five years before careering into 22 years of full-on family life. We are as free now as when he arrived in London in 1997 (on crutches, with his grandmother’s yucca tree). Dizzyingly so: we could do anything we like. Raise ostriches! Join a cult! Move to Acapulco! But I don’t want to rip everything up. I hope that is a good sign. Life feels quiet, spacious and strange; a long, slow exhale. What will the inhale bring? No idea.
