I don’t have much in common with Brooke Shields or Ulrika Jonsson. But there’s something I do share with them – and with almost 4m parents in the UK: we’re all ‘empty nesters’, and we’ve all owned up to finding this new phase of our parenting life… complicated.
The first problem is that the label ‘empty nest’ no longer fits the experience. ‘It feels out of touch,’ says psychotherapist Annette Byford, author of Once A Mother, Always A Mother (Free Association Books, £11.99). ‘It suggests a time when motherhood was a woman’s main identity, and her life – not just her nest – felt empty without children to care for.’