i'm just staring at his room right now you know like it’s empty obviously he’s at college doing his thing and i’m so proud of him like seriously over the fucking moon but it’s just this silence and this emptiness that’s like… deafening i guess it’s not just about him leaving though it’s like what the hell do i do now for twenty years my entire identity has been Mom right like everything was about him his schedule his needs his future and now it’s just crickets it’s like my entire operating system has been decommissioned and i’m just running on a ghost server or something you know the house is so quiet i can hear myself think for the first time in ages and what i'm thinking is like what do i even want to think about who even am i without the daily triage of single parenthood it’s a weird feeling like an existential vacuum or something i don’t know i’m forty now and i feel like i’ve just woken up from this really long really intense dream and everyone else is like already on chapter five of their careers their relationships their like whatever life milestones and i’m just here at the starting line again but like a much older starting line i worked a job that was flexible enough for him but not exactly fulfilling you know just putting food on the table and keeping the lights on and now i look at my resume and it’s just this patchwork of like part-time gigs and mom duties and i’m thinking who the hell is going to hire me for anything substantial like i could go back to school but the thought of student loans again is just… soul crushing honestly and what would i even study i have no idea what my aptitudes are anymore besides like remembering every single one of his obscure minecraft characters and how to fix a clogged toilet at 3am it's not exactly marketable skills right and then there’s this other layer of weirdness too like my own parents are getting older and they need more help and i’m still technically the "sandwich generation" but the sandwich just got like a whole lot less filling for me and a whole lot more responsibility for everyone else it’s like i’m supposed to be this fully formed adult with a plan and i’m just this amorphous blob of confusion and low-key panic and i can’t even articulate it to anyone because they’d be like oh he’s grown up that’s wonderful and it IS but it also feels like i’ve been erased you know it’s just this profound sense of like disequilibrium or something i don’t even know what i'm looking for by posting this just like... does anyone else feel like this when their kids fly the coop or am i just totally off my rocker