Both Our Children Left Home in the Same Autumn. The Silence Was Louder Than I Expected.

Our son left for university in Trondheim on the 14th of August. Our daughter, who had been planning to stay in Bergen for another year, got a job offer in Oslo and moved out on the 2nd of September. In nineteen days, a house that had been full of shoes in the hallway, arguments about the shower and music through the walls became a house with two people in it.

I am a teacher. I have watched hundreds of eighteen-year-olds leave. I thought I was ready.

The first weeks

The strangest part was the quiet. I would come home at four and the house would be exactly as I left it. No dishes in the sink, no bags thrown on the stairs. I had spent twenty years complaining about the mess. Now I walked through the tidy kitchen feeling like a guest in a museum.

I cooked too much food for weeks. My husband and I ate leftovers for days and did not mention why.

The marriage we had forgotten

This was the part I had not prepared for. For two decades, our conversations had largely been about logistics: who drives whom, who is picking up what, what to do about our daughter's maths grades. Without the children, we sat at dinner and, quite often, did not know what to say.

It was not unhappy, exactly. It was unfamiliar. We were two people who had been co-managing a household for so long that we had forgotten how to simply be together.

What we tried

Some things worked and some did not:

• We started eating dinner at the small table by the window instead of the big kitchen table. Six empty chairs had been depressing.
• We took an evening course in Italian together, every Wednesday. Neither of us is good at it. That turned out to be the point.
• We agreed on one walk a week, Sunday afternoon, without phones and without discussing the children.
• We tried a weekly restaurant dinner. That one failed; it felt forced and expensive, and we dropped it after a month.

The rooms

For three months I left both bedrooms exactly as they were. Then, one weekend in November, I turned my son's room into a study for myself. I felt guilty doing it, as if I was erasing him. When he came home at Christmas, he looked at it, said "nice desk", and went to sleep on the sofa bed without any sign of distress.

My daughter's room is still mostly hers. I go in sometimes to water the plant she left behind.

A year on

It is now the following autumn. Both children are doing well. We talk to each of them about once a week, usually short calls that I try not to prolong. The house is still quiet, but it is a different kind of quiet now. Less like an absence and more like room.

My husband and I have rediscovered that we like each other. We are still bad at Italian. Last month we booked a week in Bologna for the spring, our first trip alone in twenty-two years. I am already practising how to order coffee.