Parental Loneliness Quotes

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

I work every day, and every year I spend seven months away from my family. I miss my kids' birthdays, and those are times I will never be able to go back on and share with them. That kills me.

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'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.

There's just an incredible amount of loneliness as a mother, all this solitude no one really speaks to.

I remember, when I was a teenager, people telling me, 'You know, when you are a mother, you will never feel lonely. You will feel so much love, and you will be fulfilled by this love.' Then I became a mother. And I learnt that is absolutely wrong: you can feel very lonely with your children, even if you love them.

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.

I had my children, fell in love with mothering, yet couldn't find what I was looking for in terms of support or community. It felt isolating. I couldn't find 'my people.'

London does two things for me: it makes me feel connected, and it also makes me feel very isolated and quite lonely at times, and that's someone with two children in their family.

Being away from home for six months of the year and seeing your kids grow up on Skype all that time - I think I saw Molly walk for the first time on Skype. That's not good.