Jane Pauley Quotes

I'm at the age most people are sending their kids off to college.

Half the bloody world is going through a divorce; more than that are having children. All of us have parents who are dying or have died. It's just the life cycle.

I don't want to wake up and see my kids going off to college and wonder what happened.

But it all zipped by. One minute Marlena and I were up to our eyeballs, and the next thing we knew the kids were borrowing the car and fleeing the coop for college. And now, here I am. In my nineties and alone.

I feel like a different person since my mum passed away, like I'm driving a ship with my husband alongside me and we're leading these four children into unknown waters.

I've been thinking a lot about next year, which will be the first time in 25 years that I don't have a child at home.

All our children are grown up and have their own lives.

That was the toughest thing I ever had to do: tell my son that his mum was gone. I was a bachelor living on the beach, but I had to pull it together very quick for my boy.

Once you're done with the film, it's almost like empty nest syndrome: your kid has moved out of the house.

Your children will smash your understanding, knowledge and reality. You will be better off. Then they will leave. You'll miss them forever.

I think that my life changed at 50. Many things happened. Menopause, the end of youth and my daughter died that year after being a whole year in a coma. So I think that I changed and I became an elder at 50.

What happens at 50, more or less, you lose what you need to create another person, to sustain another person; you keep what you need to sustain yourself. And there's something wonderful about that.

I had a very distant relationship with my father. It was always just me and my mother. It was a shattering blow when she died. I was 16.

My dad? He died when I was 19, which is a bad time for your dad to die, because there's an awful lot of things you have to resolve with your parents past your teens if you've been a difficult teenager.

I spend a lot of time thinking about this business of letting go - letting go of the children God gives to us for such a brief time before they go off on their own; letting go of old homes, old friends, old places and old dreams.

They say the death of a parent puts you in time because that means there's now no generation standing between you and ordinary death: you're next. I don't buy it.

People make a lot of jokes about the empty nest. Let me tell you, it is no laughing matter. It is really hard.

So much of my sense of who I am is tied to mothering. When they left home, I fell into a huge, empty, black hole. Your children are grown and your career has slowed down - all the stuff that took up so much attention is gone, and you're left with expansive time and space.

With so many forty- and fifty something mums and dads in Converse stalking the streets, I can see why there's a slew of books about the menopause and middle age, the most recent addition being David Bainbridge's plucky, glass-half-full meditation or, as he calls it, 'natural history.'

As a father, you immediately become uncool, especially the older they get. The older you get, it's inevitable that, as cool as you think you are, you're probably just as lame in your kids' eyes.

In 2002, my husband died very suddenly. My main concern that day was how to deliver the news to our daughter, then eight. Someone put me in touch with Judith Wallerstein, an expert in child psychology who coached me through what to say.

While there are so many great things in my life, you get older, and you have responsibilities. And things happen, like my dad dying - things that are tough to shake off. And there are things I'm still trying to figure out.

We always regret that we did not ask our parents more, really get to know them while they were alive.

When I lost my dad, there was no one there to be the disciplinarian, and we kind of ran amok.

I suppose if your parents die in their 50s and you are approaching 50, you see that you are definitely not in the first half of your life any more.