After The Kids Are Gone, What’s Next?

When trying to decide what to write about next, I think about an issue or topic I’d like to explore and then figure out who is going to tell the story. My first book, The Good Life, examines the popular American belief that living a good life is dependent on material abundance, with a CEO’s wife as protagonist. A Changing Marriage, my second novel, looks at the first thirteen years of a marriage between college sweethearts, and the roles compromise and communication play in long-term partnerships.

My third novel, The Summer Cottage, focuses on family, especially the relationship between siblings, and how parents, often unwittingly, can profoundly impact the bond between brothers and sisters.

My new book, Every Other Wednesday, is about three middle-aged, full-time mothers who struggle to redefine themselves when their children leave home – a phenomenon experienced by so many people that it has a name: the empty nest syndrome. All parents, working in or outside the home, suffer feelings of guilt or sadness when the last (or only) child packs his or her things into boxes and bags and moves onto campus or into a distant city. We wonder if we have adequately prepared them for the adult world. We miss their presence at home. And we seem to be much more emotional about the break than our kids do.

Those of us who opted for full-time motherhood are hit on two fronts when the nest empties. One, we experience the blues and the loneliness all parents feel, the ache created by absence. And two, our purpose in life now lives in a dorm room a hundred miles away. Of course, our high school aged children didn’t need the same kind of hands-on mothering required when they were in elementary school.

But if we have made a pact with ourselves to be available until they leave us, then we do what we can to simplify their lives: provide a hot breakfast before school, cookies for a bake sale, a ride to guitar lessons, and, when allowed, a compassionate ear about a perceived injustice. We are free to fulfill these and other requests because we have put our own aspirations aside – for now.

When the last child leaves, now arrives. It’s our time to continue what we started before we became mothers, to investigate other options, to think deeply about what motivates us. Every woman, no matter what her occupation for the last twenty years, faces emotional, intellectual, and physical obstacles at this stage in life. Those of us who have been recently “let go” from the job of everyday motherhood face the additional riddle of what to do with our time.

There are so many options – yes? We can take up golf. We can volunteer at a local charitable organization. We can read novels. We can return to the work force we have been absent from for two decades. No matter what we choose, we are likely to be more introspective about it than we would have been when the children were home. Because their needs, troubles, and exhilarations are gone, we can begin to examine ours. However, it’s not easy, unless you are smart enough to have had a plan all along, to know where to start.

Our children, spouses, and working friends encourage us at this confusing juncture, telling us to follow our dreams! They text and email us inspirational messages. But our children are, as they should be, absorbed by what’s going on in their own lives. And our spouses and working friends are busy doing what they’ve been doing for years. No one, with the exception of others wearing the same shoes, thinks our uncertainty about what to do next is a problem. Or they view it as a princess problem. Because as they see it, we have a bunch of free hours every day to do whatever we choose – and we have a million choices. What they don’t see is that the magnitude of possibilities can actually be more debilitating than liberating.

One of the best ways to attack this problem is by talking with others facing it. Female friendships become increasingly important as we age; our good friends tell us what need to hear. This is why Alice, Joan, and Ellie, the three protagonists in Every Other Wednesday, meet for lunch twice a month. They have the time. They are motivated to discuss what’s next. And their discussions are often frank and unfiltered, something they have not necessarily practiced with their husbands or children.

Writing about a topic like the empty nest syndrome – or the good life, or long-term partnerships, or family and sibling dynamics – gives me the opportunity to focus my disorganized thought process, to talk to others with similar or differing opinions, to research what experts think, and to write it all down. What I hope is the (never truly) finished product is as satisfying for my readers as it is for me.

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Before writing fiction full-time, Susan Kietzman wrote in several other capacities – as newspaper reporter, as corporate client wordsmith, as museum fundraiser. She also taught English and public speaking at two community colleges. Every Other Wednesday is her fourth novel, to be released by Kensington Publishing on April 25^th. Her previous three novels, also published by Kensington, are The Good Life, A Changing Marriage, and The Summer Cottage.

Website: www.susankietzman.com.

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Twitter: @SusanKietzman

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About EVERY OTHER WEDNESDAY

Three women, each facing an empty nest, come together to cheer and challenge one another in this insightful, poignant new novel from acclaimed author Susan Kietzman.

For years, Ellie, Alice, and Joan enjoyed a casual friendship while volunteering at their children’s Connecticut high school. Now, with those children grown and gone to college, a local tragedy brings the three into contact again. But what begins as a catch-up lunch soon moves beyond small talk to the struggles of this next stage of life.

Joan Howard has spent thirty years of marriage doing what’s expected of Howard women: shopping, dressing well, and keeping a beautiful home. Unfulfilled, her boredom and emptiness eventually find a secret outlet at the local casino. Meanwhile, Ellie’s efforts to expand her accounting business lead to a new friendship that clashes with her family’s traditional worldview. And Alice, feeling increasingly distant from her husband, and alienated from her once fit body, takes up running again. But a terrifying ordeal shatters her confidence and spurs a decision that will affect all three women in different ways.

Over the course of an eventful year, Ellie, Alice, and Joan will meet every other Wednesday to talk, plan—and find the freedom, and the courage, to redefine themselves.

Praise for the novels of Susan Kietzman

“Beautifully written and closely observed…captures the deep and complicated love of family.  Reading this lovely novel, I felt the embrace of summer on the shoreline.” —New York Times bestselling author Luanne Rice on The Summer Cottage

“Readers will find themselves drawn into the tragedies and triumphs of this fictional family—distinct and yet utterly relatable.” —Hartford Books Examiner on The Good Life

 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing