The Early Taste of an Empty Table

We knew it was coming. Just not quite this soon.

Shannon is finishing her second year at university. For both years, she's been staying at the hostel, which was very much our encouragement as much as hers. It felt like a good middle ground — not the full leap of an overseas education, but not coming home every evening either. A way to stretch herself, make friends her own age, learn what it means to manage a day without us hovering nearby. It's worked, we think. And yet next year she likely won't stay, not with the possibility of an internship on the horizon. So even that particular normal is already shifting.

We accompanied Amber to Hong Kong for her first week and also followed her to work on her first actual day - our very own young Disney employee. Note: Mickey in the photo is AI-generated.

Then Amber applied for an internship. Got accepted. Five months at Hong Kong Disneyland, alongside interns from polytechnics across the region. It's the kind of thing that sounds glamorous from the outside — and it is, genuinely — but what it actually means is that our youngest is now, on her own, managing her meals, her expenses, her laundry, her time, every single day. All of it. No one reminding her, no one catching the things that slip.

And somehow, just like that, two seats at the dinner table became quietly, unexpectedly ours.

Empty nest. It's a phrase people use, and for the longest time it felt like something that belonged to other people. Older people. The kind of thing you read about and nod at sympathetically without really feeling it. Not us, not yet. Now we're doing something we never really had to do before, which is checking whether anyone is even joining us for dinner. Sending a message to the family chat. Waiting a moment. Most evenings, no one is coming.

It's a small thing. And also not a small thing at all.

We're happy for them. Genuinely. This is exactly what growing up is supposed to look like — independence, new places, new people, the world opening up in ways that a bedroom at home never could. We raised them to get here. We wouldn't want it any other way.

And yet.

There's a specific kind of quiet when your children are far away and you don't quite know how they're getting on. Not a bad quiet, necessarily. Just an unfamiliar one. The house doesn't feel empty so much as it feels like it's waiting for something that isn't coming back the same way it left.

We asked Amber to text us each day. Nothing long, just something. A word. A photo of whatever she had for lunch. Enough to know she's okay and finding her feet. She doesn't always. Days go by sometimes, and you find yourself doing that thing where you check your phone more than you need to, not because you're worried exactly, but because you'd just like to know. There's a difference between trusting that your child is fine and actually knowing it, and that gap — small as it is — is where a lot of parenting quietly lives.

Here's the thing though. Of the two of them, Amber is probably the one least in need of our concern. She's the youngest, but she has always had an early kind of sensibility about her — a groundedness that you don't always see in someone her age. She's going to be fine over there. We're fairly sure of it. Knowing that doesn't entirely stop you checking your phone, but it helps.

We want her to lean on us if she needs to. We also want her to be so absorbed in everything over there that she barely thinks to check in. Both feel true at the same time. Both can ache, sometimes on the same evening, over the same bowl of rice.

So we're adjusting, I suppose. Getting used to being two again, which in some ways is lovely and in other ways takes a little more getting used to than we expected. Cooking smaller portions. Remembering to buy less fruit. Telling ourselves that no news is usually fine news, that a quiet table doesn't mean something's gone wrong.

It just means they've gone forward.

Which was always the point, wasn't it.