Emotions in the Empty Nest

Women tell Barbara Rainey and Susan Yates that they experience a wide range of emotions when they move from having children in the home to the empty nest. Barbara and Susan describe those feelings and what to do with them, in a conversation with Dennis Rainey and Bob Lepine.

What is The Barbara Rainey Podcast?

Barbara Rainey mentors women in their most important relationships. She loves encouraging women to believe God and experience Him in every area of their lives.

Samantha Keller: Whether it’s at the beginning of parenting or at the end, transitions can be difficult. Barbary Rainey explains.

Barbara Rainey: You prepare to have children, but you really don't know what it's going to be like until you walk home from the hospital with that baby, and it's yours, and you've got to figure it out – and the empty nest is very similar. You can prepare all you want, but until you experience it, it's all theoretical. There's a sense in which, when your kids leave, I mean, that door slams shut, and it slams hard.

Samantha: Welcome to the Barbara Rainey Podcast from Ever Thine Home, where we’re dedicated to helping you experience God in your home. Thanks so much for listening!

I don’t know where you’re at in the parenting journey. Maybe you don’t have children and you really wish you did. Maybe you have a newborn, and you’re feeling pretty overwhelmed. Perhaps your house is humming with activity and your life feels consumed with meals and laundry and getting kids to school or music lessons or sports. Or maybe the commotion is in the past, and now your home suddenly feels empty. Quiet. Lonely.

Barbara and her friend Susan Yates wrote about the emotions they and others like them felt when their nests emptied out.

We’re going to listen to a conversation they had with Barbara’s husband, Dennis, and Bob Lepine about this subject. Here’s Bob to kick things off.

Bob Lepine: I want to ask you a question because you're a few steps down the path from me, a few more laps around the …

Dennis Rainey: That was very gracious, the way you said that, I appreciate that.

Bob: I want to know if the transition from single to married was harder, or the transition from married with no kids to (having) kids, or the transition from kids back to no kids. Of those three life transitions, if you had to rank them, which were the harder ones?

Dennis: The first one – getting married.

Bob: Was the hardest?

Dennis: Yeah, because I found out how selfish I was.

Bob: It just kind of bubbled right to the surface?

Dennis: That was a bad experience for me to find out how selfish I was. Number two: having kids. I found out how selfish I was. And, number three, would be the empty nest and, once again …

Bob: You found out how selfish you were?

Dennis: So you know it's really been a long transition, Bob, of me coming to grips with this.

Bob: See if our guests would answer it the same way. Could we do that?

Dennis: Let's do that. My wife, Barbara, joins us along with Susan Yates. Welcome, Susan.

Susan Yates: Oh, thanks, it's great to be here.

Dennis: Okay, you guys – excuse me – you ladies …

Barbara: Thank you.

Dennis: How would you rate it?

Barbara: Goodness, I hadn't really thought about it in those terms, so I'm not really sure. I think probably the hardest was going to kids – that would be number one over the single to married for me. And then moving from kids to no kids would be the next hardest.

Dennis: Okay – Susan?

Susan: Yeah, you know, it's funny, I would agree, because going to that first child is absolutely the hardest because you go from all this freedom to, all of a sudden, you are tied down for a long time. And then for me, also, I'd say going to the empty nest.

Bob: In fact, one of the first books you wrote was called And Then I Had Kids, and it's all about that transition.

Susan: That was the hard one.

Bob: It is interesting that you chronicled that chapter of your life and now, together, the two of you have chronicled the chapter that you're in, which was that number-two transition you talk about – the one from having kids to having no kids in a book that's called Barbara and Susan's Guide to the Empty Nest, and that's what we're going to focus on, right?

Dennis: We are, and, in case our listeners don't know Susan, she and her husband, John, live in the Washington, D.C. area. She has authored more than 13 books. She is the mom of five adult children and 10 grandchildren – did I get that right?

Susan: Ten with one more on the way.

Dennis: All right, and, of course …

Bob: This is where the bragging stuff comes in here – "Oh, you only have 10 with one on the way? How many do you have, Dennis?"

Dennis: Bob, I was not even going to mention how many we had on the way.

[laughter]

So even though the nest is empty, there are other little nests that are being populated all over the United States.

We are thrilled that Susan came to join us.

Susan, for you, the empty nest was a dramatic – well, it was a transition, of sorts, that ultimately occurred not instantly when the children left but years later, right?

Susan: That's right, because we had five kids in seven years, including number four and five, who were a set of twins. So that meant we were sending kids off rapidly, and when our third child was getting ready to go to college, our first child was getting ready to be married. So I felt like I just sort of flew through the empty next technically without even realizing I was there.

And, as you know, all five of our children got married fairly young, and so it wasn't for me really until we had the final wedding that it hit me, and I had a meltdown.

Bob: Barbara, did you have a meltdown moment when the empty nest came to you?

Barbara: Well, there were lots of little moments. I remember walking back into Ashley’s room (our oldest) when she first left, and just kind of standing around. But I had so many other kids still at home that it didn’t feel that lonely for very long.

And then, when our last one, Laura, left, I did the same thing. But in my experience, which is similar to Susan’s, the moments that catch you off-guard that are the real surprise moments.

For me, I had one after Laura had been in college for at least six months. I went
to a baby shower for a friend who was finally having a baby after years of infertility, and I was even helping to hostess this shower, so I was there early. I was greeting people at the door, helping with the food and getting all this settled, and once everything was organized and the shower was well underway, I went and sat down with a group of friends that I had known for years and just sat down enjoying their conversation.

They were all talking about lots of different things, but the topic was primarily about their kids, and one was talking about her daughter's first babysitting job and how she called wanting to know what to do about this dirty diaper, and another mom started talking about her child getting his driver's permit, and how she was scared to death that he was going to have a wreck when he took the road.

And this circle of five or six women were all chatting about their children and, for the first time, I realized I couldn't contribute, because I didn't have a child at home anymore. I couldn't say, "Here is the latest thing my child is doing." I couldn't contribute, and the longer I sat there and listened to that conversation, the more isolated I felt, and the more left out I felt.

It was really odd, and I was so unprepared for that, because I thought I was over with this and done with this, and I'd moved on because my daughter was in college for six months. I mean, I thought I would have it figured out in a couple of months, but this was six or seven months later. I got up and went into the kitchen to get away from the conversation and got in the kitchen, and the same thing was happening in the kitchen – same conversation – all these moms were chatting about their kids, and I couldn't contribute again.

So I had this real unexpected moment like Susan did when she walked into the bedroom, when I realized that I was out. I was out of the club. I'd been demoted. I couldn't participate in the way that I had been participating with women for the last 25 to 28 years of my life. We all had this commonality where we talked about our kids, and now I couldn't relate anymore the same way they were all relating, and that was the moment when I really realized that this was for keeps, and I was in a new world.

Bob: Both of you had known this day was coming. I mean, it's not like it crept up on you. You woke up one morning – "Oh, the kids are leaving?" You'd known this.

Barbara: That's right.

Dennis: And I'd actually been attempting to help Barbara prepare for it by getting her involved in her watercolors so she could begin to take some lessons and re-engage around some of the hobbies she used to have before we started having children, and yet it still was a profound transition.

Bob: Had you done things ahead of time to start thinking about imagining what the empty nest was going to be? I mean, were you trying to prepare yourself for what was coming?

Susan: You know, that's one of the interesting things, I think, because Barbara and I grew up with a lot of books on how to parent young children, how to parent teenagers, how to work on your marriage – we had books for everything, but there was hardly anything out there on the empty nest, and nobody was talking about it.

So it's like this big, blank, almost like a secret, and so you hid it. You looked at the other woman in the line at Starbucks or at the grocery store, and you wonder, “Is she? Isn't she?,” and you can't tell who is one the way you can tell a mother of toddlers or a mother of teens at the ball game.

So, we didn't have the preparation, and that really, quite honestly, is one of the reasons that we wanted to write the book because we felt like there are other women out there who are feeling like Barbara and I both felt, and nobody's talking out loud about what they're experiencing.

Bob: Barbara, even if you're thinking about it ahead of time and preparing for it, you still can't imagine it until you are there at some level, right?

Barbara: That's right. Yeah, it's the same as marriage or having children. You prepare to have children, but you really don't know what it's going to be like until you walk home from the hospital with that baby, and it's yours, and you've got to figure it out – and the empty nest is very similar. You can prepare all you want, but until you experience it, it's all theoretical.

It's been a good exercise, though, for Susan and I to talk about it and to talk to other women and to find out what they're thinking in relation to what we're thinking, too, because there are some commonalities for all of us.

Dennis: Barbara, one of your friends compared this transition to, well, going to college. What did they mean by that?

Barbara: Well, I think the illustration is that when students who have just graduated from high school go off to college – they are excited. They are looking forward to this new sense of freedom and independence, and I think, for many of us approaching the empty nest, we have a sense of excitement. We are looking forward to it because we know that there are some good things in store, and the independence will be kind of nice for a change.

But we also, like college students, don't really know what that looks like, and until you get there, and you meet your roommate, and you sign up for classes, you don't really know what the homework load is going to be like.

There are so many things that are surprises, as you journey down that road, and the empty nest is similar. You can only anticipate so much until you get there and begin to live it. There are a lot of surprises that come along.

Bob: My freshman year at college was one of the lonely seasons of my life, and I would imagine that's one of the dominant emotions that you have to wrestle with as you go into the empty nest.

Susan: I think, hands down, we have found that to be true of almost every empty-nester we've talked to, no matter where she is in the process. So often, Bob, what has happened is, as we are busy with our kids during their teenage years, we often put our own social life on hold to be at home, rightly so, with our kids when they are at home, to open our house to other teenagers on the weekend. Sometimes for us, as women, we let our relationships with other women slide just a little bit.

Then the kids leave and, all of a sudden, we look around, and we wonder, "Where are my girlfriends?" And we realize that we need to re-engage at a deeper level rather than just an acquaintance level, "Hey, how are you doing?"

Barbara: Which is what we did for so long with our kids, because we sat at ballgames in the bleachers, and we'd have conversations with other women, and we might talk about a whole variety of things – even discipline, or what do you do about this with your child, but, again, those are more surface relationships. So when the empty nest comes, as Susan was saying a minute ago, you don't recognize who is in it and who is not in it and that really magnifies the loneliness.

Dennis: And most of the relationships that you're enjoying are around the children.

Barbara: Are around your kids, yes.

Dennis: And so now the children are gone, and you're back to Barbara going to the baby shower. If you go to the football game and sit there …

Barbara: Yeah, people are going to say, "What are you doing here?"

Susan: You don't belong anymore.

Barbara: You don't belong.

Bob: The two of you did that some, didn't you?

Dennis: We went to a football game, and people kind of looked at us, thinking, "Boy, you're really bored with each other."

[laughter]

Barbara: Yeah, well, and they did say that – "What are you doing here?" I have a friend whose daughter played volleyball like our daughter did, and when she went away to college, they went to a couple of volleyball games. She had the same thing happen – people would look at them and say, "What are you doing here?" It's like, “Why would you come back to volleyball games or football games when you don't have a child here anymore?”

Bob: Well, let me ask you: were you there, in part, to try to stay connected to something that was gone now?

Barbara: I don't think consciously, but I think it was such a fun part of our lives, it was such a fun season to be involved with our kids and to go to their games, and there's a sense in which, when your kids leave, I mean, that door slams shut, and it slams hard.

Dennis: I mean, Friday night – Friday night is football. It occurs 52 times a year, Bob.

Barbara: For years it's football.

Dennis: And you're not there yet, you'll see. We went to those ball games in the fall every Friday night. So you're wondering, “ Who are we?”

Barbara: And when you do that for 10 years, it becomes a part of who you are - it's your routine, it's your habit, and so that first fall when you don't have that part of your life anymore, you just say, "Well, let's go to the game. That would be fun," because we've been doing it. It's not so much we're trying to hang onto it as it is we haven't transitioned out of that totally, and so we went – and they just weren't as much fun.

Bob: Susan, in the book that you and Barbara have written, Barbara and Susan's Guide to the Empty Nest, you center in on one word that you think is kind of the dominant word to describe the transition. Do you remember what the word is?

Susan: Well, probably the word you’re talking about is “ambivalence.” You know, that comes out in a lot of ways. We don’t know how we’re going to react, as Barbara said. Sometimes we are wildly ecstatic. And on the other extreme we find ourselves in tears. How do you balance those emotions? You know, you’re a little ambivalent: Am I up? Am I down? Am I a mixture? What is this all about?

That’s one of the most interesting things that we have discovered about this whole empty nest season is that there’s not one formula for how you walk through it. It is so complicated, it’s really like jello. You can’t get your arms around jello. It wiggles out as soon as you think you’ve got it?

It’s not neat and tidy. Unlike when we were raising toddlers and we all had to deal with discipline, we had to deal with sleep deprivation. You hit some of the same challenges in the teen years. But the empty nest is all over the place because there are so many different mitigating factors.

Bob: What about for you and Dennis? Did you find that this was harder for you? Different for you? What would you say the difference looked like?

Barbara: I would say both. In some ways it was harder for me, and I would say it was definitely different, because we process life differently – in all regards, we process life differently. But I was surprised in that it was harder for him than I thought it would be. I expected that he would just keep right on moving and barely skip a beat.

But there were days when he would be out in the back yard after he had mowed the grass or whatever on a Saturday, and he would come in and say, “Gosh, I really miss the kids.” Being able to sit by the fire

Bob: Oh, I thought it was the fact that he just mowed the yard.

[Laughter]

Bob: Wow, I really miss the kids!

Susan: He wanted them to mow the yard.

Barbara: Well maybe that was part of it and I just didn’t understand!

Dennis: I did miss the cheap labor; there’s no doubt about it. But there was a side to me as a father that I really didn’t realize was there until the children were gone.

Bob, you’ve heard me refer to this on more than one occasion: it’s like a weightlifter who has been lifting weights. Barbara and I had been doing this for twenty, almost thirty, years – 28 years. All of the sudden, the weights are gone. There’s no tension against the muscle.

As a man, you’re used to arriving home and having your car surrounded by these little people, demanding decisions, testing the limits, challenging your authority, wanting to be taught, wanting to spend time with you, and yet now, all of the sudden, you arrive home and they’re not there. It’s an interesting moment.

Susan, you invited some women into your home, and you actually did a little research on the spot. What was the most important thing you found among those women? Was there a common ingredient that you discovered there?

Susan: There was a common ingredient, and that was the need for them to say out loud how they were feeling, which was lonely, which is what we've talked about; which was ambivalent, which was a little bit fearful because they didn't know what was next. A lot of questions, and the main thing that came out, Dennis, was interesting – it was "I'm normal." That was the most refreshing thing after the evening.

I had a variety of women – one mom whose youngest was still a sophomore in high school, and she wanted to know, “What do I do to prepare for the empty nest?” To a woman whose daughter had just turned 40, and she was years into the empty nest and said, "I feel like it's hitting me all over again."

So I think what these women longed for more than anything else was to hear other women say out loud what they were feeling, and it made them feel normal.

Bob: Well, let me ask both of you to imagine that those women were assembled here today, and one of them is looking at the empty nest a few years away, and others have just entered it and maybe some are a few years down the path, but they're turning to you and saying, "You've been there. Help us.

What would be the dominant advice you'd give us so that we can be ready for it, we can go through it with grace, and we can go through it in a way that doesn't drive us crazy."

Susan: It's important to begin to think about the empty nest before you get there. A wise woman will do this and will begin to think about her life after children – “How has God gifted me? How has He packaged me? What might He be preparing for me in the future?” And we talk about this in the second part of our book.

But also questions like "How is this going to impact our marriage?" We found that to be a very huge topic of empty-nesters.

Barbara: The other thing, too, that I think we would say to them is to find some friends, find some other women who are in this season at the same time and go to lunch, go to coffee, and talk about what you're feeling, talk about what you're experiencing, share your fears with one another, because there are lots of other women who are feeling what you're feeling, and you need to know that you're not alone, and you need to process with someone.

So we would encourage them to maybe form a group and get together and talk about it, and challenge one another to think about the future and what they might want to do with their lives.

Dennis: When Barbara first started talking about doing a little writing on this subject, we were meeting together with some other business leaders and folks who were in the ministry at a getaway setting. She just mentioned that she was talking about getting a plan, getting a direction for her life and, all of a sudden, all these other women moved to the edges of their seats and said, "Can we talk over lunch?"

Barbara: Well, the first thing we said was, "Since all of you are ahead of us," and we were asking this question together, Dennis and I were, we were saying, "What have you found that's been helpful?" They all said, in unison, "We have no idea. When you figure it out, will you tell us?"

And I thought that because they were a couple of years ahead of me that they would have some advice to give, and they didn't have a clue, either. That's when I realized that there was a huge vacuum in this whole area of the empty nest that nobody was addressing.

Bob: So now you've figured it out, and you're telling them - is that what the book is all about?

Barbara: We've figured out a few things.

Susan: We've figured out what a big difference it makes to have a friend walk through it with you.

Dennis: I think that's really, in summary, what needs to happen. The empty nest wasn't meant to be experienced by a person solo. They need a spouse, and that's why this is difficult for single parents who move to this point. That's a real challenge, but I think it was meant to be shared with your spouse and being open and honest about what you're feeling and what you're going through.

But then, beyond that, I do think the great need, and this is something I've really picked up from Barbara, is the great need is for a woman to begin the process of getting her plan, and I would underline the words "begin the process." For Barbara, beginning that process was a two- to three-year period. You know, just as Susan shared earlier, it took her several years to just come to grips with what she had lost.

Well, you can't begin to get a plan unless you really come to grips with what you're missing. At that point, you begin the process of getting a plan together, getting a vision and a passion and, frankly, I know I'm biased, Bob, because I'm married to Barbara, but I'm excited about this book, because I think what it's going to do is not only really put the finger on the pulse of what women are going through or will go through at a point, those who are moms. It also is going to help women begin to craft that plan and get a vision and direction for their lives. They can experience an adventure in this next season of life.

Samantha: We’ve been listening to Dennis and Barbara Rainey, along with their friends Susan Alexander Yates and Bob Lepine.

Listen to these comforting words from Isaiah chapter 46, verses 3 and 4. The Lord is speaking:
“Listen to me, O house of Jacob,
all the remnant of the house of Israel,
who have been borne by me from before your birth,
carried from the womb;
4 even to your old age I am he,
and to gray hairs I will carry you.
I have made, and I will bear;
I will carry and will save.

No matter where you are in your journey, if you belong to God, you can know that He is carrying you. Even if you have a newly-empty nest. You might feel alone, but you’re not.

There’s more information about how you can get a copy of the book by Barbara Rainey and Susan Yates. It’s called Barbara and Susan’s Guide to the Empty Nest. For all the details, visit EverThineHome.com/EmptyNest.

Once again, check out EverThineHome.com/EmptyNest to find out how to order Barbara and Susan’s Guide to the Empty Nest.

And we want to hear from you! How are you managing your empty nest? Any tips or advice that you can share? You can leave a comment on Barbara’s Substack page. If you’re not there already, go to BarbaraRainey.substack.com, and find this episode, called “Emotions in the Empty Nest.”

I’m Samantha, saying, thanks for listening to this episode of the Barbara Rainey Podcast, from Ever Thine Home.