Graham Carter the voice of reason and experience

In the last week my wife and I have become something we didn’t even know was a thing when we got married.

Our son already lives with his fiancee, and now that our daughter has moved into a shared house that is close to her new job near Heathrow, we are officially ‘empty-nesters’.

You could argue that it really happened three and a half years ago, when she first went away to university, but although that actually seemed more monumental at the time, it doesn’t count. After all, the graduate came back to live at home again in the last few months, so the nest was only vacant, not empty.

This time it’s different. Now that she is flying off because of a job, it’s the triumph of someone standing on their own two feet and not needing us so much any more.

We are obviously going to miss having her around again, but in our case it is also a huge relief, since she will no longer have to do the stressful (for her and us) commute each day, which takes 90 minutes each way on a good day, and often longer. Now she only has to make the trek when she wants to come home at weekends.

All this means that we suddenly have the whole house to ourselves again, in a manner of speaking.

It depends on what you mean by ‘empty’, because the vacated bedrooms in the house are still stuffed with belongings, so even if we wanted to get a lodger in, we couldn’t, and probably never could.

It was the same when my wife moved out of her parents’ home, and my in-laws barely touched her bedroom again.

I used to joke that they kept it as a shrine to the daughter who flew their nest to get married.

And that’s something that I have been thinking about over the last week, ever since our daughter packed up her car and drove off to her new address.

Our generation generally only moved out when we got married.

We were older by then, and our parents had seen it coming, so they had time to get used to the idea. It was the natural order of things, and human evolution helped them prepare for it.

But as with so many things these days, the world has changed out of all recognition, compared with our parents’ world, and that is probably why some people struggle with being empty-nesters.

When I Googled it, I found some parents talking about the experience in terms of grief, as if the birds were never going to come home again. There is a condition called empty nest syndrome, where people experience depression and loneliness when the kids move out, and even a profound sense of lost purpose.

On the other hand, for many other empty nesters it is the opportunity they have been waiting for to pick up where they left off when the kids came along, so they whoop up their new-found liberation, especially as they are probably much wealthier now, compared with the parenting years.

In our house we are somewhere between those two extremes, and seeing it as a respite while we wait our turn to be grandparents.

And we intend to enjoy the break from the stresses of the job before that phase begins.

So we are raising a glass to ourselves, celebrating the successful end of a project we began way back in the spring of 1992 (or, technically, the summer of 1991), and feeling pretty proud of our achievement, like parents should.

Or, to put it another way: mission accomplished.