How Will a Home Feel on the Other Side of Parenting?

The evening my husband and I came home after dropping our daughter off at college, our sons were both away and we returned to a very quiet house. I went to sleep but woke in the middle of the night to an emptiness I had never felt before. It lurked in the darkened hallway outside my doorway and in the bedrooms beyond. Our home, I realized, would never be the same.

When we bought the house we live in, my children were young – four, two and nine months old. I remember the first night we slept h...