{"id":7246,"date":"2016-04-05T08:06:21","date_gmt":"2016-04-05T07:06:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alisonsdiary.com\/?p=7246"},"modified":"2016-04-05T08:06:21","modified_gmt":"2016-04-05T07:06:21","slug":"empty-nester","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alisonsdiary.com\/2016\/04\/empty-nester\/","title":{"rendered":"Empty nester."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_4462<\/a>Our son left home last year to go to University.<\/p>\n

The Empty nest syndrome is something I see all around. Sad eyed middle aged women getting up like clockwork to put out the endless boxes of cereal to feed the ones who have left. Our body clocks pinging at 4pm and the Pavlovs dogs reaction of shovelling a half hundred weight of biscuits onto plates and producing gallons of juice and milk for the hoards to drink when they descend on the house at 4.30pm on their ways home. Only there are no hoards now. All those muddy kneed rugby playing school boy\/men are away. Away to begin their lives without so much as a by your leave for the entrenched routines that having given birth to and brought up a child has riven into the homes and lives which they inhabited. The silence. The tidiness. The thrum of music through the wall from his room replace by the ticking of the kitchen clock. The fridge which remains full and the milk which is still bought in gallons going off.<\/p>\n

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Until this very moment you have had not a second to think about it as the toddling becomes totting into school turns to hormones turns to teenage battles turns to exams and then to – well this – the point. To bring up a responsible member of society who can clean his teeth, brush his hair, and be independent. This is a success. This was your job. OK its not full redundancy maybe a fairer term would be voluntary redundancy. It is a new beginning for them so why not you?<\/p>\n

\"cropped-sausagedogslife.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So with that in mind I am slinging my bag over my shoulder, grabbing my sausage dog and am off. \u00a0Muffin top, hormonal rollercoaster, bouts of dieting, bouts of drinking, bouts of regret, bouts of hysteria, eruptions of spots, despair, creativity, dunderheidedness, insomnia, grumpiness all accompanied by increasing hairiness in strange places – why the inside of my nose is now tufting up is not something I am either proud of or delighted about – and that’s just the half of it, said the bearded slack jawed lady. Still look on the bright side….at least when Santa retires I might be a shoe-in for the big job.<\/p>\n

With car, sausage dog and passport am off. Will report back.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Our son left home last year to go to University. The Empty nest syndrome is something I see all around. Sad eyed middle aged women…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7280,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[25,77],"tags":[1537,390,87,1566,1541,1567,1543,82,1040,1538,80,108,1542,1435,81,1536,1535],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alisonsdiary.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7246"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alisonsdiary.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alisonsdiary.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alisonsdiary.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alisonsdiary.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alisonsdiary.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alisonsdiary.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alisonsdiary.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alisonsdiary.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alisonsdiary.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}