Suzanne Harrington: Take a tour of my empty nest — it's a place of wonder

Suzanne Harrington: 'The empty nest is a place of wonder. A fragrant place of freshly brewed coffee, to be enjoyed at leisure; a kitchen filled with nothing but music from the radio.'

You know that little mouse in the shed in Wales, secretly filmed tidying up the same mess every evening, like a tiny Sisyphus dragging objects into a neat pile, only for the same pile of debris to be scattered far and wide again the following day? Parents everywhere — especially lone parents — will be identifying so hard with that mouse.

Yet you may have noticed when people say about children, in that whimsical misty-eyed way, “Oh, they grow up so fast” it’s nearly always men. This is because, generally speaking, they haven’t been the ones doing all the repetitive slog for 20 years straight. Imagine then, if you’re a single parent, just how unfast this growing up process is. It does not go by in a flash, unless by “flash” you mean a three-legged donkey pulling a broken cart over potholes. It takes forever.

And when your beloved kids finally do go abroad to seek their fortune, all spotted kerchiefs and foreign SIMs, people say frankly insane things like, “Oh you’ll miss them when they’re gone”. Au contraire — that’s what Whatsapp is for. Meanwhile, let me show you around the empty nest. Let’s take a tour.

We’ll start at the epicentre: The fridge. Look, not a single empty carton carefully replaced, pretending to be full. No takeaway boxes from two weeks ago in which lurks something terrifying, multiplying like the plot of a future sci-fi horror movie. No green pools of abandoned salad slime at the back. No kitchen tiles Jackson Pollacked in exploding tomato from last night’s violent cooking.

In the washing machine, no wet laundry from three days ago starting to smell like drains and in the dishwasher, no crusty plates loaded on top of clean ones because nobody could be arsed. No muddy boots to trip over in the hallway, no coat hills on the floor, no overflowing bins in which layer upon layer of rubbish has been squashed down because (see: Dishwasher).

None of that. No. The empty nest is a place of wonder. A fragrant place of freshly brewed coffee, to be enjoyed at leisure; a kitchen filled with nothing but music from the radio. A dishwasher abandoned, because now your life is one plate, one cup, one fork. Floors so clean you could eat your dinner off them, if you could be bothered to cook. Wafting from room to glorious room, alone, perhaps doing an occasional involuntary pirouette of joy, before retiring to work quietly, without interruption, in any damn room you fancy because nobody is sucking all the wifi out of the house.

It’s bliss, I tell you, bliss. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.

All that empty nest syndrome stuff is, I suspect, a rumour started by men and adult children to keep women poised in sandwich-making mode. It’s nonsense. Unlike the Welsh mouse, we will never be tidying up anyone else’s mess again; instead, you’ll find us on the sofa, propped on a pile of cushions, Whatsapping our kids. Smiling, smiling, smiling.