My kids are on their own, but they left a lot of stuff behind.

By Danny Heitman, Wall Street Journal, November 5, 2023

Now that our daughter and son are grown and living elsewhere, my wife and I are often asked what it’s like to be empty nesters. Even though our children have moved away, the nest doesn’t feel empty to me. When they left, a good bit of their stuff stayed behind.

Our daughter has been married a year now, but her old bedroom remains intact, a shrine to adolescent life in a previous decade. Yearbooks line the shelf, relics always neglected because young people can’t imagine needing a prompt to remember high school. There are dolls stored under the bed and some prom dresses, I think, in the closet.

Our son’s room offers a companion museum of early 21st-century boyhood. Board games, camping equipment, sci-fi novels and discarded sneakers number among the artifacts. A cello from junior high stands entombed in its huge case, solemn as a sarcophagus holding its pharaoh. Glancing at that massive memento of a son now in graduate school, I remember a friend’s maxim about parenthood: Children lose interest in a musical instrument at about the time you finish paying for it.

My wife and I occasionally talk about spiffing up the kids’ rooms into guest suites, replacing the juvenilia with a more fashionable look. But for now, when our kids return for visits, they sleep in their familiar rooms, reminded of who they once were, the adults they’ve since become. Homecoming for them is the same as it is for many of us: a chance to dwell within the walls of personal history.

I wonder if my children will ever retrieve their things, though I know the odds don’t favor it. After my widowed mother died in 2008, my siblings and I found our own souvenirs among her clutter: faded report cards, old homework, a broken toy or two in a back drawer.

Every now and then, while putting the house to bed for the night, I wander into our children’s old rooms and sense a past as palpable as the dusty shoe in a silent corner, a spiral notebook unopened for years.

In doing so, I grasp a basic truth. Children never really leave you. They fill your house as they fill your heart—completely, and with a power time can’t diminish.

Mr. Heitman is a columnist for the Baton Rouge Advocate and editor of Phi Kappa Phi’s Forum magazine.

Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Appeared in the November 6, 2023, print edition as ‘The Nest Is Never Truly Empty’.