Son's room Their rooms are as they left them. I take a picture of their rooms and show them how their plants are doing and I will alternate their rooms where I take a nap. I look around and when i see different things it reminds me of those times.

Amy, Daughter's Room I do some virtual therapy sessions in my daughter's room as she has fish in her room and she wants me to keep them company. So that is where I sit now to write.

Amy with children's portrait I miss the fun. I miss the joining in the merriment.

Amy and Eddie, Backyard I miss us all cleaning up after dinner and blasting musicals and singing … We do more when the kids are here. Without them we are pretty quiet. My tendency is to look for more novelty. I don’t feel like we are particularly good on embarking on novelty together. I like leaning into new adventures and experiences and that is not so much his thing. That has been challenging because when you are raising four teenagers every day there’s some kind of chaos going on … Now it is just really quiet and I am trying to find new things to pursue and have a growth mindset.

Carolina, Living Room I think weekends and special occasions are the hardest, not having someone to spend that time with or having to make plans so I am not lonely.

Carolina with children's portrait The kids rooms are still the way they were. This house is also the first place where I set roots. I had several moves during my childhood. I felt like I was living out of suitcase for a long time. Because I did not have parents or stable home…I was always moving. This house gave me the extra security I needed. Nicaragua [where I am from] is a very traditional Catholic country. So kids only move if it is for job opportunities or because they need to study elsewhere.Otherwise it is very common for you to stay with your parents until you get married. When you get married, they don’t send the parents to old people’s homes, they live with one of their kids. So you are not alone, life in Nicaragua is not lonely. You are always with family or friends.

Carolina, Dining Room It has been extremely hard. It is harder than I even thought. I think it is because of my circumstances because I am divorced after a long marriage and am not dating anyone. I definitely used to be all about my marriage and kids, and I feel like I did so much for them that I lost myself. It hasn’t been about me since my 20s so I guess I am trying to rediscover myself after all of these years. I am trying to find my next chapter. It still feels very fresh. I am kind of just like existing, like going with the flow and obviously that is not enough. I wish I could go back and rewind and keep something for me, something that was just mine.

Carolina, TV room There is definitely some freedom: I don’t have to cook for anyone. I don’t even have a pet anymore. I can close the door and go. I do enjoy the freedom of not having to worry about someone else, but at the same time it gets lonely. I am not proud of this but now, I watch TV while I eat. If I am with my phone or if I am watching TV while I eat, I am occupied. I would feel worse sitting at the table and lonelier.

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Melanie I felt like I was raising him to leave us.

Albhy We are multi-empty nesters as we were empty nesters about 20 years ago (those two boys are in their 40s now) and then we had [our youngest] a few years later so we became empty nesters again 3 years ago. I think empty nesters is a loaded term. For some some people it means “I have lost my reason for living and I don’t know what to do.” For others it is “I finally have my freedom.” For us I think it is just a step in evolution.

Son's room with legos I left my son’s room as he left it. It is his space and all of his legos. The older children do not have rooms here. They have been turned into a guest space. There is still a sense of him here. Even the cat meows outside of his room!

Melanie and Albhy, Breakfast Counter We still have his seat the breakfast counter. The mail is often placed there, almost like a placeholder.

Melanie and Ably, Backyard It was like discovery. It’s like you are still in love. We sit around and every night we make dinner together. It used to be that we were making sure he was there for dinner, doing his homework and very much about him. And after he was gone then our life was about us. We can re-discover each other and do things we did not have time for before.

Backyard The backyard used to be planted with clover and it was totally flat so Jacob and his friends could play soccer or sidewalk chalk … After he left, we let the native plants take over, wild and woolly. It started during his last year of school. We had a giant vegetable garden during the first part of Covid, that he actually tilled, and then after, it started transitioning. We let it grow, just let it be what it was going to be.

Debbie and Barry, Living Room Debbie: Barry was morose for a long time. He would go down the hallway and stand in front of her room. I had a bit of YAY moment. I feel like I can focus inward. I had been focused outward for so many decades (and not in a bad way, because I wanted to), but now am glad I do not have to do all of those things. I felt there was a bit of freedom and a breathing out. I don’t have to make dinner if I don’twant to now. Barry: I had always wanted to be an active part of her life. So I look into her room and I see all these different phases of things we did together. I like seeing the visuals as it rekindles the energy and spirit. For me being an empty nester is really that she is living elsewhere but her home is still here.

The two of us

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Barry, Garage So much of her life is still around here. There’s a lot of horse stuff and stuff that she collected The big change for me is that I used to help take care of her horse gear. I was doing it up until the day she left for school. Her tack. I was the groom and the barn boy. Since that time, I have been working on starting a new business.

Her room

Tony, Dining Room I never had the cookie cutter kind of life — like you raise your kids, they grow up, you send them to school, make them their lunch and they go off to high school, then college and then you are all alone hoping you raised them right. I was hoping it would be something like that but it was nothing but chaos.

Tony, Front Window with Daughter

Tony, Garage Sometimes I want nobody in the house and they are here. I can’t be myself because they are here in my space. It is supposed to be my space. It is supposed to my time now.

Tony, Kitchen Both kids have been living here for the past couple of years and just recently I got a daytime shift. But both kids are here but I don’t see much of them... but I do see their dishes and their mess. And a lot my daughter’s furniture is here, replacing mine. I feel their eyes and their presence. I tried to provide support for [my daughter and my son] in everything they do. I love when they are here and I love cooking for them. I enjoy making them french toast.

Dinnertime

Sondra, Kitchen table In general, the focus of my life has not been me. It has been my patients and my daughter. Now the focus is back on me. I get to figure out what is it that I want to do. Everyone thought that I was going to lose my mind because they thought that my daughter and I were codependent and that neither of us would be able to survive without the other. But we did just fine. I am doing more cooking and focusing on my health and I also changed jobs which requires me to commute but I could not have done that with her living at home.

Sondra, Backyard I can’t say I miss her per se. I over scheduled myself in the beginning on purpose just to fill the time, but then I realized I don’t need to do that because I am fine. I am okay.

Shannon and Nestor, portrait of their boys We had a sliding door. One left for college in the fall, and a few months earlier the other one graduated and came home but he is ready to move out next month. We are sad. I feel like we do have the empty nest because he's so self sufficient. I think we crave his company a bit because he's gone a lot. We don't see him as much as you normally would. Even though it's not a big house, he finds his own space and he is on his own even within the house. I see empty nest more as a concept of not being this active parent, letting them fly by themselves. whether or not they're living here or not. When our youngest left,it broke my heart. I had all these dreams about him being a toddler and me losing him in a store or a mall or at the beach or something. We lost our dog pretty quickly after. So I felt like we didn't have something to come into the house. That made it more of an empty nest for sure.

Shannon and Nestor, front yard I have to say it does feel like a hole. But we have spent a lot more time together, a lot more time doing things, going out with friends, dinner parties. We are igniting our social life a bit, and that aspect of it has been great, and also traveling a lot. So we've been active in just doing stuff, not necessarily glamorous things, but things that need to get done, but done together. It is about reacquainting yourself to your partner and saying what is it going to be like now? After 20 some years of this shared common responsibility now its just like us and this is the dynamic that counts and theres not even a dog to dote on. There's no pickup and drop off, right? So even like just waking up and saying, Do you want to go grab breakfast? I mean, those days were gone for 20 some years. There's been a massive shift in terms of time. Now you're not having to do the minutia. I certainly found myself pondering a lot of sort of bigger questions about life, about what comes after this.

Shannon, front garden The first thing we did was, last year, in the fall, was to redo the front yard, which has been really fun, you know? And it was sort of an open blank canvas. It was a essentially a rectangle that Shannon had designed into this really sort of beautiful oasis. It's like our own new space, because the kids really don't know this space very well. [Our eldest] is highly allergic to bees, so I've never been able to plant trees, or even many flowers. I was worried about that in the front yard, but then I realized he is only coming and going, like, he's not really in, like, inhabiting like we are. It gave us more freedom than to plant all those things that I wanted to.

Living Room

Nestor with skateboard park, Living Room This skateboard park became our summer project a few years ago. [Our youngest] designed it, we went to Home Depot, went to art stores, and we both together built this sort of model out of like styrofoam. And then I found a guy who actually does build these things and cements them. And so we hired him to, you know, to put it on stilts, to cement it. And the result is what we have in our living room, which had been great, because for years, he had kids come over, and there would be six of them playing on this, this thing in our living room. We didn't want to put it in the garage, and because we wanted them to really, truly play and and so now, now that he's gone, we're like, "Okay, let's get rid of it" but he doesn't want to. It's sentimental. And I get this, but you want the space back now, we don't need the thing yet. No one's using it, yet for years, we've kind of admired it

Studio + Bedroom [When our eldest son graduated from college and moved back home], he took over his sibling's room as his studio, so now he owns two rooms, one for his bedroom and the other for his studio, but we made him leave the bed in there so his sibling has somewhere to sleep! So, like we're very conscious of you can't budge him out of his rooms. After he moves out, I think that'll become an office, a writing room. That room is gonna have another function, yeah.