So . . . the bizarre-ness of coming home from China has abated somewhat, and the term has settled in - well, beyond settled in; we're in the home stretch, really - and something has begun to dawn on me.

Our little nest is empty.

That's right. Emma is off in the Deuce, going to school and doing rather well for herself; and Chas is in Tucson, working. He calls regularly (or we call him), and he seems fine. (He actually called me on my birthday, with no prompting from anyone. I was totally blown away by this. Perhaps I set too much store by it, having been a passive-aggressive teenager who knew how upset my own mother got when she didn't get a birthday acknowledgment . . . you can probably figure out how I figured that out . . . so when Charlie called me, I thought, "Gee, we must've done something right.")

So things are pretty good with both kids, which is nice.

And it's even nicer that they're out on their own (give or take a few bucks). I mean, I like this empty nest thing a LOT. So much so that I feel guilty, as a matter of fact. But life seems so much easier. So much simpler. So much cheaper. The food bills have dropped to near zero. (Not quite, but comparatively speaking, that's how it feels.) If we want to have dinner together, we have dinner together. If we want to eat separately, we eat separately. If we don't want to have dinner, we skip it. I'm sure the folks at the pizza places and sandwich shops around here are confused, because we haven't placed a delivery order for anything all fall.

On Halloween we closed up the house, went out to dinner, and went to the mall. I have nothing against Halloween - most years, I quite enjoy it - but this year, we figured, what the hell. Not that the kids were a big presence on Halloween the past few years - but I did kind of feel like we needed to do the candy thing to be civic-minded, or something . . . but now we can be misanthropes and we won't damage anybody . . .

I don't know if I'm saying that plainly. But I remember looking at Charlie in his crib on the day we brought him home from the hospital, and realizing that, unlike the cats, if something happened to him, the police would be involved. That's how the gravity of parenthood expressed itself to me; I realized that that little mite tied me to the world, made me responsible to society, in ways I was only beginning to grasp.

And in many ways, I didn't like that At All. For instance, I didn't like being a hockey mom; I was perfectly happy for my son to play hockey and I was happy to schlep his stuff to the rink at 6 am, and so forth . . . but I absolutely hated hanging around with the other parents during practices or games. And once the kids got out of fifth grade, school was a nightmare. I hated just about everything involved with interacting with the schools, and was often blindsided by my interactions with school administrators. (I, who had been a model student, was usually rendered completely inept by administrator-speak.)

I was so ill-equipped to parent teenagers, I shudder to think about it. (It wasn't until my own kids were 18 and 16 that I realized how strange my own high school years had been.) We had several years, there, that were really, really hard. Lots of worries, lots of fears, lots of angst all the way around. It's easy to be happy that those years are behind us.

It's not that I don't love the kids: I do. And I'm certainly glad we had them. They were probably the most-wanted children on the planet. (Except for yours, of course.) And we had many wonderful times while they were growing up. And I'm proud of them now for lots of reasons. But raising them tested me in lots of ways - pushed me out of my comfort zone. And there was no going back. If you have a bad marriage, you can get a divorce. If you hate your job, you can find another. But kids are another story; there's no ditching that obligation once you've undertaken it. As a person who always likes an Alternate Plan, I was unnerved by this. On the bad days, I couldn't think, "Well, I could always leave . . . "

So this empty nest thing feels like a cakewalk. My friend Russ once told me, "You know when life begins, don't you? Life begins when the kids leave home and the dog dies." I thought it was pretty funny at the time . . . but I had no clue that it was actually . . . true.

So there it is. I'll try not to feel too guilty about it . . .