When You Want to Fill an Unfillable Void

Well, hello. It’s been nearly eight months since I’ve written a newsletter, and honestly, I thought I was done with writing for good. Lately, though, I’ve been feeling wisps of creativity beginning to resurface after their long hibernation. At first, I ignored them. I worried it was a passing fancy. What if I wrote one post and then promptly scurried underground again for another eight months? Worse, what if, as I mentioned to my husband this morning, I’d forgotten how to write altogether? “What if what I write is really bad? I asked. It felt dumb to say it out loud, but honestly, I felt afraid to begin again.

But here I am. Sitting in a local coffee shop, cup of hot chocolate at my elbow, stack of journals on the table, trying hard not to overthink it. I am afraid to begin again, as dumb as it sounds. I am afraid it will be awful. I’m doing it anyway.

So yeah, hello! It’s been eight months! A lot has transpired during these days and weeks. Our boys both moved out last August; after 23 years, we are officially empty nesters. And can I tell you? It’s been hard. Much, much harder than I anticipated.

Both of our boys are still right here in town, each a ten-minute drive away. We see them fairly often. Rowan stops by to pick up toothpaste and paper towels. Noah comes to clean the fish tank that’s still in his former bedroom. They have dinner with us from time to time. We meet up for pizza. We text.

And yet. They don’t live in our house anymore. I don’t wake up on Saturday morning knowing they are asleep in their beds. They don’t leave half-empty glasses of water on the coffee table and a flurry of crumbs on the kitchen counter (I’m not as sad about this). I miss their coming and going and the energy that fills the room when they are around. I miss their funny, sardonic comments and their quick wit and their weird slang. I miss their big presence and the space they take up and how everything feels more sizzly and alive when they are around. I miss them.

I feel a palpable emptiness. They have left a physical void. And try as I might to fill that void with busyness and chores and new hobbies and social outings, I am coming to realize that it is largely an unfillable space. Maybe not unfillable forever. But unfillable for now.

I’m also realizing that some of the restlessness and anxiety I am feeling these days is a result of my desire to fill this void. It’s an uneasy feeling — one that, on some days, I’m rather desperate to alleviate with a distracting task or a shiny new pursuit. I find myself looking for a project or a goal that will demand attention and energy. Today I will paint the trim in the upstairs hallway! Tomorrow I will launch a new photo series on Instagram! Maybe I’ll take up punch embroidery! But the truth is (and it’s taken me close to six months to understand this), there is no new hobby or project or task that will fill the space that day-to-day parenting occupied for so many years.

I’m wondering, if this is, in fact, the point. I’m wondering if maybe we aren’t meant to fill every void. Maybe we aren’t meant to smooth over every loss or fill every empty space. Maybe, in fact, that is the very point of parenting. Your children’s lives grow and expand, pressing against the edges of the necessary boundaries you have set until one day, they no longer fit. They expand beyond their space, and then they leave to grow on their own into a bigger space. Maybe, it seems, we are meant to feel this loss — to acknowledge it, to live it, to be here in it for as long as it lasts.

“When we lose anything we cherish — a way of life, a loved one, a dream, a belief, even the day-in-day-out presence of a child at home — a space that was filled in our lives and in our hearts is suddenly empty,” writes Katrina Kenison in her memoir Magical Journey. “Sorrow, then, is surely a human, natural response.”

I appreciate Kenison’s willingness to define the empty nest experience as a legitimate loss. I think some of us might be reluctant to acknowledge the empty nest as a kind of grief. We feel guilty, because others we know carry much weightier sorrows. And yet, in refusing to name it, in refusing to acknowledge it for what it is — a sorrow, an emptiness, a loneliness — we also inhibit our capacity to grow into the next iteration of our true selves.

“Life offers each of us the opportunity to practice dying a little every day,” Kenison writes. “If I can learn to accept change and loss rather than fighting against it, perhaps I can also find a way to a freer, more light-hearted existence during these years of aging and transformation.”

And so, here I am, living uncomfortably in restlessness and empty space, trying to name and acknowledge and be with, rather than resist and fight. I’m practicing dying a little bit, and I don’t much like it. Some days, though, I am a teeny bit more successful at this practice than others. Some days I am able to trust that right here, in this discomfort, sorrow and unease, is exactly where I am supposed to be.