Empty Nest Syndrome Quotes

The one thing I missed was never having children. It just wasn't in the cards, I guess.

'After 17' is a song I wrote when my first daughter went to college, so that's kind of where I'm at in that part of my life. If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you'd say, 'Oh yeah, he wrote that about his daughter,' but I try not to write them that they are so specific that they wouldn't apply to anybody that has a child.

About the time I turned 50, I experienced the profound biological change that often accompanies women at that age. Also, I put two kids in college and lost both of my parents, so I'm no longer somebody's daughter.

What is sad for women of my generation is that they weren’t supposed to work if they had families. What were they to do when the children were grown — watch raindrops coming down the windowpane?

I diagnosed my loneliness as premature empty nest syndrome.

I've never been pregnant, so I just feel God didn't mean for me to have kids so that everybody else's children could be mine.

If you live for your children, they may be smitten down and leave you desolate, or, what is far worse, they may desert you and leave you worse than childless in a cold and unfeeling world.

We're all weirdly single, middle-aged women with too much money who look to fill the void with too much shopping.

Today Mitt Romney is 68 years old. It's kind of sad, a 68-year-old guy with no job, no future - wait a minute, that's me.

We're both getting older, our children are starting to leave home. But I can say that I'm just as passionate a songwriter now in my 50s as I was in my 20s. But instead of talking about the general kind of angst that I felt as a teenager, I'm writing about more specific issues.

My children are grown now, they are more independent.

I happened to the be the fifth child of my family, so everybody was already grown and had left home already.

On my daughter's first day of kindergarten, another mom said something that made me realize I had become my own Greek, suffocating mother. She said, 'Just think, in 13 years they'll leave us and go to college!' And I went, 'Gulp.'

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

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

This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.

I tell people with children still in the house to go out once a week and talk about anything but the children. Otherwise, once you are an empty nester you might have nothing to talk about.

You see much more of your children once they leave home.

For me, often, there's such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I'm going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don't know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.

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

Much is written about parenting - its joys and tribulations - and then about the transition into hot flushes, night sweats and (if we're lucky) a new life as a grandmother.

When mothers talk about the depression of the empty nest, they're not mourning the passing of all those wet towels on the floor, or the music that numbs your teeth, or even the bottle of capless shampoo dribbling down the shower drain. They're upset because they've gone from supervisor of a child's life to a spectator. It's like being the vice president of the United States.

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.

Ironically, now that my children are older and gone quite a bit, I find it harder to work when they're not around. Too much free time!

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