When You're a Single Parent, Empty Nesting Hits Differently

I thought the hardest part of lone parenting would be raising two children alone. It turns out letting them go wasn't exactly easy either.

There seems to be no shortage of social media posts about empty nesting. Every September, my Facebook feed fills with photos of couples smiling in a student bedroom as their child unpacks fairy lights and enough stationery to open a small branch of WHSmith.

I find myself wondering what happens after the picture is taken. Dad makes a bad joke to break the tension, Mum wipes away a tear and then they both get back into the car and begin the journey home together.

My experience was always going to be rather different because, for most of my children’s lives, there was just me and them.

I was widowed when my daughter was three years old and my son was eleven months. Looking back, I have absolutely no idea how I got through those early years, although I suspect most lone parents would say exactly the same thing. For me, there wasn’t a grand strategy or carefully constructed five-year plan, just the reality of two little ones who needed me for everything, whether I felt particularly capable that day or not.

Like any parent, I found myself swept along by the relentless pace of family life, only mine happened to be a one-woman operation. Some days felt endless; others disappeared so quickly that I barely remembered living them.

What I recall most though, isn’t the practical side of it. It was the knowledge that every decision ultimately rested with me. I envied couples who had another adult in the room to share the worrying with, or reassure each other that one disappointing school report wasn’t going to ruin a child’s future.

Yet somewhere amid all that muddling through, something rather lovely was happening too.

For years it was just the three of us, navigating life together as best we could. We weathered difficult things side by side and became incredibly close. Not in that curated Instagram way where everyone appears to spend weekends baking cinnamon buns in matching knitwear, but in the way families become close when they rely on one another. I was raising them, certainly, but there were times when I suspect they were helping to raise me too.

We developed our own language, our own traditions and our own ridiculous sense of humour. Even now there are references that can reduce us to fits of giggles despite nobody else having the faintest idea what we’re talking about.

We travelled too. Adventures through Italy, Cuba and Costa Rica, getting lost in unfamiliar cities, finding extraordinary places entirely by accident and collecting stories that still resurface years later. Then there were the ordinary evenings at home made up of fiercely competitive Footloose dance-offs in the kitchen and curling up together to binge watch Netflix boxsets.

Only now do I realise how much I took that time for granted. Nobody announces that this will be the final holiday with everyone under one roof, or the last evening spent watching a film together before careers and relationships begin pulling everyone in different directions.

When my eldest left home four years ago to study costume design, I couldn’t have been more proud of her. But while she was starting a new life filled to the brim with talent and ambition, I was left completely heartbroken.

People would ask how I was coping and I would tell them how wonderfully she was settling in, which was true. What I tended not to mention was that I kept wandering into her bedroom for no reason at all, trying to make sense of the fact that the little girl who had occupied such a huge part of my everyday life now lived miles away.

At the same time though, my son and I suddenly found ourselves with something we’d never really had before: each other. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t sharing me with his sister and I wasn’t dividing my attention between two children.

I watched him become a young man and found myself enjoying his company in a way that felt entirely new. We went to the theatre and out for dinner, discussing everything from politics to whatever strange rabbit hole one of us had disappeared down online that week. There was a lot of laughter. An almost ridiculous amount, if I’m honest.

Those two years felt less like parenting and more like having front-row seats to the person he was becoming. And so when he joined the King’s Guard, I assumed it would feel like another version of the goodbye I’d already experienced.

It didn’t.

Because the morning he left, I returned to a house that no longer belonged to a family in the way it always had before. I sat on the kitchen floor and cried my eyes out, overwhelmed by a silence that felt almost physical. The little three-person team that had carried me through widowhood, childhood, adolescence and everything in between had finally dispersed. Part of me was grieving the kids flying the nest, but another part was grieving the end of a version of my life I had loved for more than twenty years.

For months, I found the abundance of time and space strangely disorientating. But gradually, I started remembering all the things I’d once promised myself I would do when things became less busy. I spent hours writing and painting with no one to ask anything of me. I accepted invitations without first checking three diaries and calculating if anyone needed collecting later that evening. I travelled more, took creative risks and discovered how whole weekends could disappear without a single trip to a supermarket for emergency supplies of milk.

While my partner and I don’t live together, I finally had the time and headspace to invest properly in our relationship rather than squeezing it into the gaps between the packed lunches, swimming lessons, birthday parties and last-minute World Book Day costumes.

And most surprisingly of all, I stopped feeling guilty about putting myself first, although that particular lesson took longer than the others. Years of motherhood had trained me to place my own needs somewhere near the bottom of the list, just above remembering to descale the kettle.

Without doubt, the heartbreak of empty nesting is real. As is the bone-deep sadness and the sense of loss. But so is the is the opportunity to discover who you are when your life no longer revolves around being needed every second of the day.

My daughter is now busy building a career in London’s vintage world, while my son is preparing to march at Trooping the Colour. Watching them build lives of their own remains my greatest privilege.

I still miss them, of course. Sometimes fiercely. But then they FaceTime or come home for the weekend and I am reminded that empty nesting isn’t about losing your children. It’s learning that after years making sure everyone else was okay, you’re finally allowed to think about what comes next for you.