Parenting an "Adult" Kid Is Its Own Rollercoaster

Parenting an "Adult" Kid Is Its Own Rollercoaster

I dropped my daughter back at college this week for sophomore year. I want to tell you I'd gotten good at this by the second time. That the drive home would be easier, that I'd know exactly what to do with myself, that a year of practice would have smoothed the whole thing out.

It didn't. It was just a different kind of hard.

She'd been home for three months — long enough that I'd stopped counting the days and started just living inside them, the two of us back in something that almost looked like our old rhythm. And then, in the space of one Saturday afternoon, the car was packed, the goodbye happened in a parking lot that felt too bright for how I was feeling, and I was driving home to a house that had gone quiet again, the same way it had the first time, except somehow also nothing like the first time at all.

Nobody warned me it would be a cycle. I think I assumed, somewhere underneath it all, that the empty nest was a single door you walked through once — hard on the way in, easier every time after. What I'm learning instead is that it's not a door. It's a loop. You walk through it every August, and again every December, and again every May, and again every summer, and each time it asks something slightly different of you.

Here's what nobody tells you about drop-off day: it isn't one feeling. It's six, arriving at once, none of them waiting politely for the others to finish.

In the same ten minutes, I felt sad — genuinely, physically sad, the kind that sits in your chest. I felt empty, the house-shaped kind of empty that has nothing to do with how many people actually live there. I also felt happy, watching her walk toward her friends with the particular confidence of someone who already knows where she belongs. I felt proud, the kind of pride that's almost too big to hold quietly. I felt free — an honest, slightly guilty flicker of okay, my calendar is mine again — and right behind it, I felt guilty for feeling free at all, like relief was somehow a betrayal of how much I love her.

I used to think I was supposed to pick one. Was I sad or was I fine? Was I proud or was I grieving? I've stopped trying to land on an answer, because I don't think there is one. I think the truth is just: all six, at the same time, for as long as it takes to get back in the car.

I want to tell you about this week specifically, because I think the small details matter more than the general ones.

We'd done the move-in routine before, so there was less scrambling this time — we knew how to pack those giant zippered bags, what tools we needed to bring, how many trips it would actually take instead of the wildly optimistic estimate we'd made the first year. It was almost efficient. And somewhere in the middle of that efficiency, I remember thinking, this is easier now, right up until it wasn't.

The moment that got me wasn't dramatic. It was her hugging me after her room was finished — a real one, not the quick kind that came with a look of sheer joy — and then leaving to meet a friend, already laughing about something on her messages before she left the room. I stood there for a second longer than I needed to, watching her fold back into a life that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with who she's become, and I felt that particular ache of being simultaneously unnecessary and essential. Unnecessary to that exact moment. Essential to how she got there.

I didn't cry when I got in the car. I cried about twenty minutes into the drive, somewhere on the highway, for no single reason I could point to — not really sad, not really anything specific, just the pressure of the whole day finally finding an exit. I let it happen for a few miles and then I turned the radio up and kept driving, because that's the other thing nobody tells you: the feelings don't need you to pull over. You can carry all six of them not just in that moment but for the whole next year.

The part I wasn't prepared for wasn't the leaving. It was the coming home.

I had this idea, somewhere in the back of my mind, that when she came home for breaks we'd slide back into our old routine — family dinners, the same rhythm we'd had for eighteen years, the house running the way it always had. What I didn't account for is that she isn't eighteen years into that rhythm anymore. She's an adult with her own agenda, her own friends to see, her own schedule that doesn't automatically defer to mine just because she's sleeping in her old room again.

The first time I really felt this was a dinner I'd planned — nothing fancy, just a meal I'd been looking forward to making for weeks, the kind of thing that used to be a given when she was home. And she wasn't there. She'd made plans with friends she hadn't seen in months, and of course she had, and of course that mattered to her, and I sat at that table doing the work of being genuinely okay with it instead of quietly hurt by it. That's not nothing. That's actual work — reminding yourself that her not being at your table doesn't mean she doesn't love you, it means she's living a full life, which is the entire thing you raised her to do.

And then, just as often, the opposite happens. I've made plans — dinner out, a weekend trip, something I assumed she'd want no part of — and she's chosen to stay in with us instead, no fanfare about it, just quietly picking the family over the plans. Those nights land differently now than they used to. When she was younger, an evening at home was just what happened. Now, when she chooses it, it feels like being chosen back.

I've come to think of this season as letting go without letting go. You're not stepping back from parenting — you're still fully her mother, still the first call in a crisis, still the person who knows her better than almost anyone. But you're doing it without the schedule that used to make the relationship feel automatic. It's less like being replaced and more like being invited to a different kind of closeness — one that isn't guaranteed by proximity anymore, which somehow makes it mean more when it happens.

Spring comes, and it happens again — the goodbye, the quiet house, the recalibration. I thought this one might not sting, since I'd already done it once. It stung anyway, just less loudly.

What's different the second and third time around isn't the ache — it's how quickly you know what to do with it. The first time the nest emptied, I didn't have a plan for the quiet; I had to build one from nothing, slowly, over months, which is its own story I've written about elsewhere. This time, I already had the plan. I knew to reach for the habits that had helped before — the morning that's mine, the friend I call, the version of myself I'd worked to reconnect with. The house went quiet again, and I didn't panic. I just picked the practice back up, the way you return to something you've actually gotten good at.

That's worth naming, because it's easy to only talk about how hard this cycle is and skip the part where you're also getting stronger at it. You are. Every loop through this — the leaving, the quiet, the rebuilding — is also practice at being fully yourself, independent of whether the house is full or empty. That practice doesn't disappear between cycles. It's still there, waiting, every time you need it again.

Then summer arrives, and she's home again — really home, not a long weekend, but three full months of her actual life happening under my roof again. And it is, genuinely, wonderful. I don't want to undersell that part. There's a specific kind of joy in a full house of friends again, in her voice down the hall, in a house that has its noise back.

But here's the part I didn't expect, and the part I think we say out loud the least: somewhere in those three months, an odd guilt creeps in — not guilt over missing her, but guilt over how good the quiet had gotten, and how her being home, wonderful as it is, disrupts the "new normal" I'd spent a whole school year quietly building.

I wrote once about the guilt of liking the quiet when the nest first emptied — how strange it felt to enjoy a house that used to be full, like enjoying it meant I hadn't loved the noise while I had it. I thought I'd resolved that feeling. It turns out it didn't resolve. It just relocated. Now it shows up in reverse: I catch myself, mid-summer, missing a version of my own routine that only exists when she's gone, and then immediately feeling like a terrible mother for missing anything about a quiet house while my daughter is home and happy and right down the hall.

I don't think that makes me ungrateful. I think it makes me honest. You're allowed to love having her home and also miss the rhythm you'd built without her. Both things get to be true in the same summer, sometimes in the same afternoon. The version of me that grieved the quiet leaving is the same version that now, quietly, sometimes grieves the quiet returning. That's not a contradiction. That's just what it looks like to have built an actual life in both configurations.

There's a version of this cycle that doesn't just happen to me — it happens to my marriage, and I didn't expect that part.

When she's away, my husband and I are just two people in a house again, the way I've written about before — rediscovering how to talk without a schedule between us, taking walks, remembering how to be a couple instead of two co-managers of a household. We get good at it. We build a rhythm that's genuinely ours.

Then she's home for the summer, and as much as I love it, I notice our rhythm quietly shifts back too — dinners built around her schedule again, conversations that circle back to logistics, the two of us slipping into parent-mode without discussing it, just because it's familiar. It's not a step backward. It's just a different configuration, one we know how to run just as well. But it means that every time she leaves again, we're not only readjusting to a quiet house — we're re-finding each other as a couple, for what feels like the third or fourth time in a single year.

I used to think that renegotiation was a one-time task, something you did once when the nest first emptied and then you were simply done. It turns out it's more like a muscle you keep using, every single loop — the two of us relearning how to be a couple, then a family of three again, then a couple, on a rhythm set by someone else's academic calendar. It's strange work. It's also, I've come to think, some of the most honest work either of us does all year.

Here's the reframe that's helped me the most, and it's a simple one: this isn't a single transition I need to get through. It's a cycle I'm going to live inside for years, maybe for as long as she's in school, maybe in some quieter form long after that. Once I stopped treating each drop-off and homecoming as its own isolated crisis to survive, and started treating the whole thing as a rhythm I'm learning to move with, it got easier — not because the feelings got smaller, but because I stopped being surprised by them.

A few things that have actually helped, offered less as instructions and more as company for the ride:

Expect all six feelings, every time. Sad, empty, happy, proud, free, guilty — they're not a sign something's wrong. They're just what this particular door feels like walking through. Naming them as they come, instead of trying to sort them into one tidy emotion, has made the whole day less disorienting.

Let the old routine go without taking it personally. The missed family dinner isn't a rejection. It's evidence you raised someone with a full life of her own, which was always the goal, even when it doesn't feel like it in the moment.

Notice when she chooses you. The night she stays in isn't owed to you, which is exactly what makes it worth noticing when it happens.

Rebuild your own rhythm on purpose, not by accident. The quiet house isn't just something to endure until she's home again. It's a season with its own shape, worth filling deliberately, the same way you'd fill any other chapter of your life.

Let the guilt exist without letting it run the show. Missing your quiet house while she's home doesn't mean you love her less. Missing her while you're enjoying the quiet doesn't mean you're relieved she's gone. You're allowed to hold both, every single loop.

If you're somewhere in this cycle too — mid-drop-off, mid-homecoming, mid-summer, mid-anything — I don't think I have advice, exactly. But I have questions, the ones I keep asking myself as this thing loops back around.

Which of the six feelings hits you hardest on drop-off day, and which one do you least expect?

Is there an old routine you're still quietly grieving, one that maybe needs to be let go of on purpose instead of by accident?

When was the last time she chose you, and did you let yourself notice it?

What does the guilt in reverse look like for you — the quiet parts of your new normal you miss without meaning to?

I don't think these questions have tidy answers. I think they're meant to be sat with, maybe journaled through, maybe returned to every time the cycle comes back around, because I suspect the answers shift a little each year, the way we do.

I keep coming back to something I wrote in an earlier entry, back when the house first went quiet: that underneath every title I've ever held, there's a person who existed before any of them and is still here. I believed that the first time I wrote it. I believe it more now, a full cycle later, because I've watched it hold true through the leaving and the coming home and the leaving again.

The rollercoaster doesn't stop. I don't think it's supposed to. But I'm not the same person getting on it every time — I'm a little steadier, a little less surprised by my own six feelings, a little more myself in the quiet and a little more present in the noise. That's not nothing. That might, actually, be the whole point.

If you're in your own loop right now — a drop-off behind you, a homecoming ahead, a summer you're not sure how to feel about — I'd love to know: which part of the cycle are you in, and which of the six feelings is loudest for you today? Find me on Instagram, or send me an email — I read every single one.

And if you want something to actually hold onto through your own version of this loop, I've put together a simple companion for it — a printable that maps the year's rhythm, drop-off to homecoming and back again, with space to sit with your own version of the six feelings each time they come around. You'll find it in the free Resources section of the website.

This is part of an ongoing series of journal entries on reconnecting with yourself, one season at a time. If this one found you at the right moment, you might also like “Who Am I Now? Reconnecting With Yourself When Your Nest Is Empty” and “How Your Village Changes (And Why That Isn’t a Loss).” Come back, as my Journal still has many empty pages.