Donuts and Ice Cream: Ways Parents Cope with the Empty Nest

A few days after my daughter left home for college I was driving to the university where I teach psychology classes two mornings a week. On the way there is a donut shop that I’d occasionally stopped at to buy a dozen donuts for the department secretaries. However, this time I bought two dozen donuts without thinking, kept the extra dozen in my car and later brought them home. They were the most luscious kinds: cream filled, jelly-filled, rich chocolate, glazed and covered with nuts. I don’t eat much sugar, so why was I suddenly buying donuts? I think I was comforting myself and my wife in our time of loss. It wasn’t conscious. I didn’t think, “Now I will comfort myself and my wife with sugary treats,” I just did it like a robot. It was a way of unconsciously filling up the hole I felt in my heart now that my daughter left home and it took me a couple of weeks to realize what was happening to me when my clothes started to be too tight for me and I went to Target and bought a digital scale and saw compelling evidence that I had gained five pounds!

Friends of our told us that for one whole year after their daughter went to college they ate a quart of ice cream together every night.

These are examples of people trying to cope with difficult feelings and painful life transitions. I personally don’t like change all that much. I was happy the way things were–why did they have to change? Of course I knew the obvious logical answer–that people need to leave their parents and grow up. But emotionally it still hurt.

I’d be interested to hear how you, if you’re an empty nest parent (see definition on my “Empty Nest Seminar” page), are dealing with your empty nest. What behaviors have you engaged in healthy and unhealthy that are attempts to deal with your own empty nest?