A reminder that there was life before kids

An empty nest preview. It's gonna be okay.

June is roaring in with a flurry of activities as it always does when the school year comes to an end. And when I say the end of the school year, I mean this is the mother of all Junes as I’ve come to know it for the past fifteen years. Soon, I will no longer be a NYC public school parent. I feel this in my gut as I deliver the last homemade dessert for a teacher appreciation luncheon and donate one last time to help close the gap from budget cuts that have afflicted NYC public schools for as long as I’ve been a parent.

Each of these last milestones I experience with a tinge of sadness. Who the hell gets teary after a Parent Association meeting? Apparently, this sappy person! So much so that I was flustered and didn’t scramble fast enough to click the “Leave Meeting” button on Zoom to avoid being the last person in the room. Craaaap!! Imagine this: me, alone in a sad virtual room, staring back at myself surrounded by nothing but my feelings.

I haven’t yet begun to process the imminent transition that’s lurking around the corner. I’ve just surrendered to the current and it’s all happening so fast that I don’t have time to overthink or react. Maybe that’s for the best.

I remember when I first started this Substack a year and a half ago, I had already put a countdown clock on the days till my youngest left for college. Now, here we are in June with graduation a week away. It’s all coming at me whether I like it or not. From where I stand, there are two options. I can either be brave for my kid and not over-dramatize how big this milestone feels for our family or I can let the tantrum of emotions loose for the next three months and not care what the optics look like.

Not to worry. I’m not about to do the latter. I will maintain my composure so my kid can leave come August without any worry that her hopelessly emotional mother will survive without her.

Today, June 5, is our 22nd wedding anniversary. Today also happens to be the kid’s prom—which is to say, the focus will be on her today and not us. We’ve got a busy afternoon and evening running around Prospect Park taking photos and chauffeuring the kids to the venue.

The cheesiest, most touristy photo of us in Paris on our last big family vacation right before Covid times

This is all fitting as it encapsulates how it’s been for the past 20 years—our focus has squarely been on the kids. Whether it’s a subconscious filtering or an intentional avoidance of facing the fact that it’ll be just the two of us again, our lives have been happily consumed by parenting and running a busy household.

I’m not saying that there’s been an element of dread for the empty nest, but I’m also not saying that there hasn’t been any angst in the unknown of being childless again in our day-to-day lives. I know we aren’t alone as these questions roll about in our heads: will we have enough things to talk about? What will we do on the weekends? Are we going to eat all our meals on the couch? DO WE STILL EVEN LIKE EACH OTHER??

1997-ish, before kids (I’m not taller than Mark—I’m standing on a ledge)

I have to remember that there was life together before kids—many years in fact, a whole dozen! And there will be life together after kids. But it doesn’t make it any less surreal to end up where we started, just the two of us.

When you’ve been with someone for 32 years, basically growing up together and having had barely any years as adults before becoming parents, there is bound to be some anxiety. I look at my friends who are a year or two ahead of me as empty nesters and make mental notes: the number of times they’ve taken vacations without kids (in off-season, no less), the number of evenings spent eating leftovers for dinner (three straight days gets tiring, I’ve heard). I predict that some dinners might become lazy affairs and we’ll graze at whatever is in the fridge. We may not, in fact, eat at the table most days. We may also have to admit that our life is really boring.

Ok I’ll admit, I wasn’t able to lower myself so gracefully onto these low chairs, nor was it easy to get up

But a funny thing happened recently. We found ourselves on our own over the last few weekends. We’ve been so thrown off of normal routines by the Covid years that we’re only now catching up to how much teenagers want to live their own social lives.

On a recent Saturday, Mark and I walked around the East Village marveling at how much this once-familiar old neighborhood of ours no longer felt familiar. We stopped for a coffee at a Japanese coffee shop on 10th Street and splurged on $7 lattes. We lounged on lawn chairs on the sidewalk and snapped photos of our drinks and sent it to the kids…I don’t know, as proof that we weren’t some lame oldsters doing nothing but chores on a Saturday afternoon.

And the next weekend, kidless again, we drove out to the North Fork, Long Island and bumbled around the seaport towns, tracing our route as we did so many times with our children, stopping by all the farm stands and wineries. Except this time, we actually sat down on a vineyard full of young grapevines and ordered a glass of Riesling and half dozen oysters. It felt like summer, and it felt like freedom.

Who are we? So civilized!

So THIS is what empty nested people do on the weekends? THIS is what we can look forward to? Wine and oysters and fancy coffee? We laughed because this life didn’t seem like ours. “This is so civilized,” we repeated to each other while looking around at all the other childless people at leisure holding glasses of wine and eating cheese.

I started to revel in the fact that vacations will no longer will be bound by school schedules when airfares and hotel rates are inflated, not to mention we might only be paying for two plane tickets, not four. I mentally calculated how much money we’d save on groceries and how eating out is going to cost us half of what it does now. Wheeeee! My frugal spidey senses got tingly at visions of treating ourselves to small things like an ice cream or a coffee—indulgences that we’ve foregone for so many years in the name of frugality because ordering ice cream for a family of four now costs upwards of nearly 30 dollars.

And suddenly, I remembered what life before kids was like.

Friends, it’s going to be ok.¹

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This week’s drawing

More white-on-tone drawings. I was going to fill in the clothes, but decided not to. I think this could be an interesting stylistic direction. I’m particularly happy with how the hands turned out. Hands are hard!

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Related reading

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A few things of interest this week

• Ando Patisserie 214 E 10th St. (pictured above). If you’re in NYC, here’s a place to try specialty coffees like black sesame lattes and Jasmine lattes. They actually have many tantalizing desserts, but I wasn’t giddy enough about how much money we’d be saving as empty nesters to pony up to spending $15-18 on a single dessert that is like four bites. But they really do look lovely.

• Instagram confirms test of ‘unskippable’ ads (TechCrunch). I don’t regret weaning off of IG one bit because unskippable ads ahhhhhhh!! 🫨

• Are We Doomed? Here’s How to Think About It Students in a course at the University of Chicago sorted through the future that they will inherit. (The New Yorker)
  I think about this question a lot! And bonus video midway featuring Michele Zauner of Japanese Breakfast at the New Yorker Festival. She’s moving to Seoul for a year to write her second book.

• Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web with Jack Conte | SXSW 2024 Keynote (Youtube) Ok, there’s a fair bit about the future of Patreon towards the end (Conte is the CEO), but this was an interesting keynote about how algorithms are killing creators’ ability to connect with fans and their communities.

1. Check back with me on college move-in day in 83 days.