Empty nesting when your child is still in college can feel at times like living in a set of parallel universes.

In one universe there’s a house filled with noise and a driveway with one extra car. 

In this universe everything feels just as it should be. Your grocery cart is loaded down with their favorite foods, and your laundry baskets are filled with their dirty socks and t-shirts. When you notice the house is running low on spoons (not to mention bowls), you know exactly which bedroom to check. 

At night you fall asleep in this universe comforted by the knowledge that somewhere beneath the same roof your child is also slipping off to dreamland. 

In the second universe, the house is quieter, the driveway emptier, the grocery bill smaller, the laundry baskets lighter, and you never seem to run out of spoons. 

Your first few ventures into this universe were painful. 

Somehow, though, you’ve found a comfortable space here in this universe, a place where you’re getting reacquainted with a version of you that you haven’t seen in nearly two decades. You leave weekend plans to the last minute and spend entire Sundays binge watching Netflix because you can. 

You take funny pictures of the dogs while they’re sleeping and text them to the family chat. 

Maybe you make dinner. Maybe you eat leftover pizza … again. 

You learn to treasure weekly video chats. 

You paint the office a brand-new color, and when you think about retiling the bathroom, you know exactly which bedroom to check for your missing tape measure. 

In each universe, you are still a parent, still walking around with a whole human being nestled in your chest, still thinking ahead to birthdays and worrying about snow tires. 

But you’re a different you in each one, a you who has to slip through the portal between the two worlds on and off throughout the year. 

You’ve learned the journey’s a whole lot bumpier heading in one direction. 

With the holidays behind us and the start of the spring semester charging toward us, that portal is set to open again this week. I’ll see you on the other side.