Author Tembi Locke talks about the grief, joy, and evolution of sending a child out into the world 

By Rebecca Carroll  

When I was a budding young feminist growing up in the 80s, I would occasionally hear adults use the term “empty-nest syndrome” to describe the experience parents go through when their children leave home for college. The narrative around it was always very gendered, and usually homed in on the loss of identity for the mother: Who even was she without her children at home? I remember thinking, both judgmentally and naively, “Oh my god! Your children are not your identity! Women are more than just mothers!” I also thought it was a classist assumption that all kids go to college, but whatever. 

Decades later, as I find myself going through this experience myself (my son just started his third year of college), I’ve come to realize that “empty-nest syndrome” is not about whether or not your kids are your identity, but rather, the complex shift in dynamic that happens when your children leave home, and the overwhelming sense of grief that can come along with it. 

Lucky for me, and all of us, bestselling author Tembi Locke has a new audiobook memoir, Someday, Now, that is about precisely this. Locke’s first memoir, From Scratch, which was adapted into a Netflix miniseries starring Zoe Saldaña, followed her experience as a young woman studying abroad in Florence, where she falls in love with an Italian chef, marrying him, and then losing him to a rare form of cancer when their adopted daughter Zoela is just seven. Someday, Now picks up after more than a decade of Locke single-parenting Zoela, and it’s the summer before she’s about to leave for college. The two take a trip back to Italy together to prepare, reimagine, and find joy in the culture and comfort of extended family in another country. I was delighted to sit down with Locke to talk about this period of life that is often so swiftly dismissed, especially for women.

Rebecca Carroll: What are your feelings about the actual term “empty nest”? 

Tembi Locke: I rebuke the word “empty” because nothing about my life is empty. Not my spirit, not my relationship with my child. And I’m not going to characterize my life with an adjective that starts with “empty.” I choose instead to take this time to think about what is full in my life, and what I would like to invite back into my life. I didn’t rush into a bunch of hobbies. I didn’t rush into a Zumba class. I just needed to hang out in the question and see what would emerge.

What do you think people get wrong about navigating this time in our lives as parents?

That there is a-one-solution-fits-all. Like, “Okay, I’ll cry. I’ll have my feelings the first month or so. And then I guess it just all kind of resolves itself in some way.” There’s this sense of not slowing down to acknowledge the depth, the tectonic shifts that are happening. I had a work colleague who said something along the lines of, “Oh, well, now you’ll just have more free time, you can do more work!” And I was like, “I am so sorry. I lean way the hell out of that thought.” I actually need to slow down and really take inventory before I proceed.

I was so struck by the way you connected your grief about Zoela leaving with your grief over losing your husband. When my son left for college, it almost felt like a sick joke: Having this child of my body was such a balm, and then 18 years later, he leaves? I was not prepared for the sudden grief. Why don’t we ever talk about that emotion?  

We’ve mostly lacked the language and rituals to process in those terms. Our children go off, and then it’s suddenly like, “Wait, what the hell just happened?” Because I have had the direct experience of grief before, I was like, “This feels eerily similar in my body.” So in a way that made me perhaps more acutely attuned to name it. 

You talk in the book about making certain choices around what feelings to share with your daughter and which to save for your therapist…

What’s funny is, the first summer she came back, that’s when I realized, “Oh, it’s not just about us being apart and then coming back together.” That’s when the actual renegotiation of the relationship really began, because I understood that the child who left is gone now. I remember saying to her, “I’m not a roommate, I’m actually the person who will be up at night thinking about your safety at a certain hour.” I was trying to keep the long vision in mind, because for 18 years, my job was to rush in to some degree, fix things. But that’s not the role now. I also realized that feelings I experienced as my younger self were activated by my child leaving—and that is the work of a therapist to unravel.

My son and I were very close when he was younger, in part, I’m sure, because he knows that I am adopted, and he understood how important his biological connection is to me. Now there’s this letting go that feels like abandonment. I can’t not express sorrow…and yet, I don’t want to make him feel bad.   

I try to pre-process some things for myself before I open my mouth. I was experiencing it, as I say in the book, with a tinge of maybe even shame. Like, how can I use the word “abandonment”? How is a child abandoning a parent? 

To the idea of pre-processing—the summer before my son went off to college, I had two TV writing projects in the pipeline, which I had planned would keep me very happily distracted. Then the writer’s strike happened, and suddenly, I had a lot of time on my hands. I would have missed him anyway, of course, but without work to busy myself, I was almost paralyzed by his absence. It was bad. I couldn’t even look at his favorite foods in the grocery store. How do we reconcile these feelings without also experiencing, as you said, some measure of shame?

One of the things that I needed to do as a mother after Zoela left home was to actively bookend every difficult, challenging, or fearful thought with an acknowledgement of the hard work, the joy, and the sense of security that we had co-created together. I even did a ritual for myself to acknowledge those 18 years, because as a solo mom and a widowed parent, there were a lot of challenges.

What was the ritual?

I did 40 days of journaling where I just set aside time each day, lit a candle, and I just wrote to the idea of…motherhood. I carved out space to allow whatever would come up around the topic of this beautiful life experience I had that wasn’t done yet. It was shifting, but it’s not done. Motherhood doesn’t end. But it is changing.