I am writing this on a flight, somewhere between Los Angeles and Boston. Next to me, a young couple is tending to their ten-month-old baby: passing a bottle, bouncing her when she fusses, trading weary but tender smiles. Their world is diapers and nap schedules, the endless rhythm of caregiving.
My world today looks very different. I am taking my youngest child to college. With this trip, all three of my children will be launched. When I return, the house will be quieter than it has ever been. I can already imagine the stillness, how the absence of footsteps and laughter will echo louder than sound.
Watching the couple beside me feels like looking into a mirror across time. They are at the beginning of the arc of parenthood, holding tight because their baby cannot yet be without them. I am at the other end, loosening my grasp, while knowing my children still need me, just differently.
As a therapist, I sit in my office every day with clients who are navigating transitions. I remind them that grief is not confined to death. It shows up in milestones, in change, in the quiet acknowledgment that life will never look quite the same again. I talk often about paradox: how joy and sorrow can sit side by side, how pride and loss can coexist in the same moment.
Today, I feel that paradox in my own body. Pride in my children’s independence. Ache in the letting go. Excitement for their future. Longing for what is past. A tightness gathers in my throat, making it hard to swallow, even as a spreading warmth rises in my chest. My body, wiser than words, tells me what I already know: Joy and grief travel together.
Parenting, I have come to see, is a slow lesson in trusting the foundation we have built. The first time I left my children at daycare, I felt it. Later at camp, then at school drop-offs. Each separation was practice for this one, the day they walk onto a college campus and do not return home at night.
In my work as a therapist, I know it is not my role to fix. My role is to listen, to witness, and to help clients find their own way forward. Parenting adult children feels similar. At 18 and 20, my kids still need me, but not in the daily ways they once did. They need me to be present, to guide when asked, and to trust the foundation we have built together.
Empty nesting, perhaps is not about absence but about shifting presence. My children no longer need me to direct the story; they need me to believe in them as they write it for themselves.
The baby beside me babbles, a sound both ordinary and profound. Her parents smile at one another, tired but full. They are at the beginning of their journey, and I am at a threshold of mine. Both stages are beautiful. Both are demanding. And both remind me of the truth I return to again and again in therapy and in life: Letting go is not about disappearing. It is about showing up differently.
Perhaps as my children are stepping into their future, so, in a way, am I.
Alana Epstein is a psychotherapist.
