After a long, hot day of carrying bins from car to dorm room, my husband Michael and I waved a final goodbye to our oldest daughter from the parking lot of her new school. As she walked away, I lowered my car window for one last photo and captured her disappearing figure from behind. She never looked back to see my hand raised in a half-wave goodbye.
Illustration by Jeff Gregory
As she began her first college classes, so did I. Instead of snapping a first day of school photo of her standing on the side porch as I’d done every year since kindergarten, Michael took a single photo of me standing at the same door. My hair is wet and I’m already sweating through my skinny jeans and makeup from a combination of nerves and August heat. I was about to walk into my first college classroom as a new adjunct writing professor.
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Teaching writing was never part of my life plan. I began my career as a nurse and transitioned out of nursing when I realized it was not the career path for me. I stayed home with my three kids as we moved both domestically and abroad for Michael’s job and, along the way, slowly built a body of writing behind the scenes.
When my oldest began high school, we finally settled in New Jersey, and the sense of being rooted gave me time to imagine a future beyond parenting. Journal entries from that season reveal both a family with three teens on the cusp of leaving home and a mother whose grief over the transition would be either her making or her breaking. One day, in fact, I found myself alone and sobbing in a parking lot after dropping my oldest off on her first date. I recognized something was amiss about my reactions to the normal rites of passage our family was experiencing—none of my friends felt these as losses in the same way as me. I couldn’t put my finger on why this transition was so difficult, but an internal urge compelled me to begin planning for a life beyond parenting while still in the thick of it. I applied to graduate school for a degree in creative writing.
Then when my second child left for a university 10 hours away, I was nearly inconsolable. My sadness still felt oversized for a “normal” event in the life of a family. Children are supposed to leave, but knowing this didn’t make the transition any easier. Fear whispered that they would go and never come back to me. I asked God to help me release my kids into His loving care, but all I wanted was for time to rewind like a film reel so I could experience their childhood all over again. On top of that, my son left for college at the height of the pandemic, and between his departure, the chaos of an upside-down world, and the unwelcome arrival of heightened anxiety bordering on panic, I knew I needed to seek counseling.
In those sessions with my counselor, I came to realize the thing that had been urging me to dream beyond the child-rearing years was grief. It was anticipatory mourning over the inevitability of my children leaving home. At first it left me feeling resentful that I was struggling long before they left us. But when I grew quiet and listened to sorrow speak, my next steps began to appear one at a time in front of me. God already knew my anguish intimately as I slowly became aware of it, and through it, the Holy Spirit urged me to move in a new direction.
As my children left home, grief led me to earn a degree in a new field, begin teaching college students the same age and stage as my kids, and heal past wounds. Naming and talking about my loss helped me to honor what this season of child-rearing meant to me—and to prepare for the next season. For all of us, there is wisdom to be found when we acknowledge our pain. It brings meaning to what we experience, helps us close chapters in the past and welcome the good ahead. Grief is wise, and it changed the course of the second half of my life.
A friend described the transition of sending her youngest off to college as “unbelievably brutal” and her hardest season yet. In the years leading up to this event, she was consumed with a move, work, and ministry; she didn’t have the capacity or time to attend to the heartache that was subtly making itself known before he actually left. I felt compassion for her as she faced her grief over this transition for the first time. Her experience made me realize that as I attended to my unexpected tears, deep feelings, fearful thoughts about the future, and oversized reactions to events, God used my grief to lead me in the direction of hope and healing over time. There was no lightbulb moment. Instead, I discovered a gentle revelation in my spirit that helped me take one next step after another toward an empty nest and the unknown.
Last summer we packed college-bound bins for the third time and drove our youngest child 12 hours south of our home in New Jersey. Saying goodbye to her—and to this season of my life—still hurt, but alongside the sadness, I was able to envision a hopeful future ahead for my children and for myself.
The next day the three of us met for a quick goodbye breakfast before my husband and I made the long drive home. We dropped her off in the parking lot just as we had dropped our oldest off six years before, and I snapped a photo of the last of my children walking to a dorm room alone. This time, joy overshadowed my grief. She wasn’t walking away from me; she carried my love with her as she walked toward her future. And I was walking toward a future, too.
