RouletteWeekend

When my last kid moved out, I didn’t cry right away. I walked back inside my house, looked around at the quiet, and thought, “This is fine. I’ve been preparing for this.”

Nobody tells you that the quiet doesn’t always feel like peace. Sometimes it feels like the aftershock of an earthquake—your house is still standing, but everything inside you is slightly off-center.

I didn’t grow up and then have kids—I grew up with them. We figured out life together: from sharing ramen and Netflix passwords to navigating college and military applications. They were my roommates, my co-pilots, my reasons.

I became a mom at seventeen. A year later, I had baby number two, and my youngest son was born seven years after that. I was a statistic in every sense of the word: pregnant again within a year, relying on state help, and unsure what parenting was supposed to look like. Even though my mom tried, she didn’t exactly know either. These things are generational, they say.

What nobody tells you about being a teen mom is that your kids become your identity before you’ve even figured out your own. And when they leave—when they actually do the thing you raised them to do—it doesn’t just leave a quiet house. It leaves a quiet you.

I hadn’t just been preparing—I’d been counting down since I was 26. It wasn’t that I didn’t love being a mom. I loved it so much, I made it my whole personality. But when the soundtrack of “Can I have five dollars?” and someone yelling “Mom!” from the bathroom cuts out, you’re left listening to the silence—and wondering who you are without it.

Nobody tells you that you’ll handle your kids leaving with a strong, subtle grace—because the dogs are still there. You still have a creature depending on you. You still have someone to say good morning to, someone to feed. You still have something to love and be loved by.

Nobody tells you that the unraveling doesn’t come the day the kids move out. It sneaks in later, on soft paws. It comes when the last dog dies, when the leash is unhooked for the final time, when the bowls are put away, and suddenly no one is there waiting at the door. That’s when the silence becomes deafening. When the house that was always unlocked becomes deadbolted. That’s when the grief shapeshifts—less about your children being gone and more about the realization that no one needs you in the way you’d built your life around being needed.

Becoming an empty nester isn’t a single moment—it’s a series of small absences. And some hit harder than you expect. I was no longer Anna’s mom, Bradley’s mom, Mel’s mom. I was just Angie. Angie with no kids at home. Angie with no dogs at home. Angie with no responsibilities at home.

And you’d think I’d be jumping up and down and dancing, but there was no music. Only loneliness. Questioning. Wondering. What’s next? Where did I put that list—the one I made for after the kids were grown and gone? The one filled with all the dreams I swore I’d chase when it was my turn?

When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a Rockette. And an English teacher. And a nomad who backpacked across Europe, waiting tables just long enough to earn a few bucks before moving on to the next city.

Nobody tells you that even the wildest dreams you had at sixteen—yes, even the glittery Rockette ones—don’t fully disappear. They just go dormant under the weight of responsibility, waiting for space, for breath, for a quieter moment to reintroduce themselves.

Staying still was never part of the plan. But nobody tells you that life has a way of handing you a completely different script—especially when you’re naive enough to believe that your plan is the one you’ll actually be living out.

Life happened. Babies happened. Survival happened. And that list of dreams I had? It got folded up and tucked away somewhere between diaper changes and double shifts.

Now, nearly three decades later, I’m trying to unfold it again—crease by crease. Not all of it fits anymore. Some of the dreams feel like they belong to someone I used to know. But some of them still light up when I touch them.

And maybe that’s what this next phase is about: not starting over, but starting from here.

Nobody tells you that you might have so many things on your list that you can’t pick just one—and you’ll change your path every month or so, hoping to finally land on the thing that feels like “it.”

So I’m doing just that—starting from here. I’ve been writing again. I’ve been saying yes to things that scare me a little: hosting a poetry open mic, growing vegetables from seed (some of which actually lived), launching a business with nothing but an idea and a Canva account. I picked up the ukulele for a week. I learned how to make mayonnaise from scratch—once. I made an epoxy table that looks like the ocean—because, of course, I also wanted to be a mermaid.  I’m letting myself be curious, creative, and occasionally chaotic, like a teenager in a Hobby Lobby with a credit card.

Nobody tells you that reinvention doesn’t feel brave at first. It feels unhinged. One day you’re crying in the laundry room, the next you’re convinced you should start a kombucha brand—or become a sourdough baker, even though you can’t, for the life of you, keep your starter alive.

It’s not always graceful. Some days, I still stare at the walls wondering what to do with the hours that used to be filled with making dinner for four or searching for someone’s jock strap. But more and more, I’m finding moments that feel like me—the me I have always thought I was before I had kids, and the me I’ve become because I had them.

There’s something powerful about being both. About owning your history without being defined by it. About loving your role as a mother while learning to love the woman you are without the daily duties of motherhood.

I’m not trying to go back to who I was. That version never got the full story. This isn’t a comeback. It’s a becoming.

Of course, the house didn’t stay quiet for long. The first thing I did was go out and rescue two more dogs. Now I’ve got six stray cats who treat my back room like it’s their personal Airbnb, and a raccoon who thinks she’s one of them. They all come to dinner like clockwork. The raccoon thinks she’s entitled to the good kibble now, and honestly, I respect her for having high expectations even if I try to trick her into eating the stale dog food. 

So here I am telling you something that nobody told me…

Maybe you don’t need total silence to figure out who you are after all. Maybe you’ve been big-hearted, a caretaker, a lover, an explorer, a writer, and an artist this whole time. Maybe it wasn’t lost—just tucked in the back of the closet with that scratchy wool sweater from Auntie Pat. Turns out, it still fits—just not the way it used to. And maybe that’s the point.