The kids are gone. What now?

My wife Steph and I recently celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary on August 28th.  Two days later we dropped our youngest son off at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We live 1,807 kilometres away in Aurora, Ontario a commutable and quaint town about 45 minutes north of Toronto. Our eldest son graduated university in the spring, finishing his Bachelor of Arts in Communications from Wilfred Laurier University about 120 kms from our family home. He moved back, but with a demanding job in the kitchen of a gourmet restaurant, we do not see him that much. While this may feel like content, it is not, it is context.

Steph and I are in the middle of trying to figure out our next steps. I am almost 55, she is way younger than me (her words), turning 52 back in April. We both have jobs, mine stable with a bank, hers entrepreneurial, running her own design firm, which is successful, but not as predictable.  

We have spent 88 per cent of our marriage years immersed in the activities, opportunities, demands, desires and absolute wonder of being parents. It is how we identify and relate to one another. It absolutely dominates our communication and conversations and has jointly become likely our greatest accomplishment. Through a myriad of fuckery, our two giant boys have evolved into two grown up men. And pretty awesome ones at that. We are lucky but we also have to take a little bit of credit. I take more than she does, but in actuality is likely reversed. Just don’t tell her I said that.

But what now? Yeah, yeah we are not true empty nesters. Hudson, our eldest still lives at home, moving back with rest of the graduates who can’t afford housing right away. But we never see him, he works 2pm to 12am almost every day in the kitchen, so we only get late night blips when he is lonely and wants to talk to someone about his shift. Or mid-afternoon see you laters as he leaves almost immediately after waking up. So, he is here, but not really. So that leaves us. Old friends, even older lovers, looking at each other, twiddling our mental thumbs, trying desperately to not make watching a Netflix series our only connection point.

Now that planning family meals, gathering dishes from rooms, or gagging at the scent of the nine hundred pairs of shoes will no longer dominate our lives, what else is there?

So, we started this. EmptyNestyBesties. Pretty much the cringiest name of a content play you could imagine. But man does it sound good when you sing it. We don’t know what this is yet, but after a dinner party with friends last night, we got some validation that we are not alone in this stage of our lives. Many other couples there were already in, or on the cusp of being with one another (or by themselves) without the demands and joys of living with their kids. Lots of what do I do now and a few thank God they are gone. So basically, both tears of sadness and tears of joy and lots of red wine.

I will blog post more as I like to write more. Steph sees beauty in everything and turns that into making everything she does beautiful so she will handle that part of this adventure. Whether it grows into something, we do not know, but is hopefully the first of many new things we are going to try together and maybe build a community of like-minded people along the way.