I don't know if this really counts as a confession, but sometimes I think about the first day my son left for university, how I just stood in his bedroom, looking at the empty bed. I was 40, like the woman who posted earlier, and completely... disoriented, I suppose. The anhedonia was almost comical — I’d spent two decades in this hypervigilant, maternal role, and then BAM. Nothing. My husband had already decamped to his new, much younger wife at that point, so it was just me and the silence. It took me until I was nearly 50 to figure out what to do with myself after that, which is really quite a long time to experience a kind of existential vacuum. But hey, at least I got good at solitaire! — that's something, right?