In a rare moment of trying to de-clutter my life, I read part of a journal I kept in1990.   A post-Thanksgiving entry that year read as follows:

“No matter when a child leaves, no matter for how long, I have the same wrenching feeling in my stomach. 

It’s an ache of emptiness.  It probably was there when I left them at nursery school at age three.  It definitely was there when each of them at fifteen went off for a summer, one to Kenya, two years later the other to Sweden and Russia.

The amazing thing is that within 48 hours, everything is OK.  The quiet house becomes the norm again.

The first wrenching pain had been their births.  The first of many…”