We are on our way to being vagabonds! The house has sold, and our youngest son is on his own. It all happened incredibly fast, as these things tend to do. With all the kids launched, and no house to worry about, things are, honestly, a little weird. I have not fully processed my newly empty nest, and the fact that the nest has radically changed from a large house to a tiny apartment. This is all a lot of change in a very short period of time. Why is it that my brain always seems to be days behind in accepting reality? It took a couple of days for it to sink in that the house is not ours anymore. It is taking even longer to fully realize that none of my children require any day to day mothering anymore. I cried. I went a little crazy and partied. I cried some more. It is the strangest grief I have ever felt. It is grief at the loss of a meaningful daily activity (mothering). Simultaneously, I am thrilled at how capable my kids are. I am proud of how they are on their own, building the lives they want to have. That makes me feel like I was successful at the whole mom thing. The thing is, I liked who I was when I was in the moment, being their mom. I like who it made me become. And I know that these new life experiences of going liquid and vagabond travel will change me. Maybe I am grieving the inevitable loss of that version of me. At the same time, I cannot help but move forward. I am called to the mission. And that will require becoming something more than Mom. Truth be told, the best parts of mother-ness will serve me well as this next phase of life unfolds. It is not a loss but an expansion. What more will I become? Because now I don\u2019t have any excuse to not become what Is needed.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A personal diary reflection on selling the family home, the youngest child leaving, and downsizing to a tiny apartment \u2014 processing the strange grief of an empty nest while reframing the change as expansion rather than loss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3090,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2029,615,2030,2032,1660,2031,2033],"class_list":["post-3088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-diary","tag-apartment","tag-diary","tag-empty-nest","tag-going-liquid","tag-house","tag-last-child-out","tag-vagabonding"],"acf":{"recommend_blurb":"For parents facing an empty nest or anyone in the disorienting middle of big life change. Kathryn names the strange grief of losing a cherished daily role while trusting it into something larger.","citation_snippet":"Dr. Kathryn Messegee (Kathryn Colleen), \"Well, That Escalated Quickly!,\" https:\/\/kathryncolleen.com\/studio\/well-that-escalated-quickly\/","topics":["essays","growth"],"related_book":"","buy_url":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kathryncolleen.com\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kathryncolleen.com\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kathryncolleen.com\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kathryncolleen.com\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kathryncolleen.com\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3088"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kathryncolleen.com\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7488,"href":"https:\/\/kathryncolleen.com\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3088\/revisions\/7488"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kathryncolleen.com\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kathryncolleen.com\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kathryncolleen.com\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kathryncolleen.com\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}