Authors:  Various
Publisher: Chicken Soup for the Soul
 ISBN-10: 1935096222: ISBN-13: 978-1935096221

Click Here To Purchase Chicken Soup for the Soul: Empty Nesters: 101 Stories about Surviving and Thriving When the Kids Leave Home

Jack Canfield, Carol McAdoo Rehme, Patricia Cena Evans, Mark Victor Hansen - Empty Nesters: 101 Stories About Surviving and Thriving When the Kids Leave Home is a volume planned to support and give power to those who are facing the now vacant house after years of parenting.

Empty nesters is a collection of poignant, thought provoking sketches with reference to parents who are facing and dealing with a wide array of feelings as their children depart from home.  A void of feeling, dejection, lonesomeness, and for some, a bit of jubilation are all a predictable, and normal ingredient of those emotional ups and downs.

On the pages of this Chicken Soup for the Soul edition are 101 accounts concerning how to go about thriving and enduring forward when the kids leave home and the house feels too empty.  I enjoyed reading the variety of narratives and remember my own mother as my sisters and I each moved away from home a period of a year or so, college, first job, marriage; and the house which had resounded with the sound of rock – n – roll and calls of TURN THAT DOWN was now the hushed dwelling of Daddy and Mama.

I went to visit one weekend, and heard the radio blasting, in answer to my query concerning which of my sisters had also arrived, I was a tad astonished and a little amused to hear that I was the only one. Mom had the radio blaring just to make it seem as though we were still there. 

A work of 334 pages separated into Dedication, Foreword and eight divisions dedicated to an explicit area of the empty nest condition.  First Flights is a dozen plus tales centered on departure for first job, college, or the military.  I chiefly enjoyed My Nice Surprise and Simon the Rubber Snake.  Intermingle with the yarns are poems, elegy and cartoons.

Systematized into segments having titles reading First Flights, Under Our Wings and in Our Hearts, Out on a Limb, and Ruffled Feathers, the sketches are offered over two or three pages per each account. Parents, siblings and those who are taking flight from the nest all have anecdotes to relate, and various of them are created here on these pages. 

There are parents who are overflowing with contentment that their children are growing up, becoming adults and prepared to set out on their own, and there are others who just cannot in fact get a good handle on the actuality that the kids are mature and moving on.  Our children growing up is just an additional juncture in their maturity and in ours. 

Send Cookies brought a grin to my lips,  how like my own sons is the young man in this account, as he coaches his mother on the subject of whether she should write to him while he is in boot camp, no she shouldn’t he says, the other fellows will believe him a wimp.  A week later Mom received a call, -MOM please write and send cookies, I’m the only one who is not getting mail.

Empty?  Says Who? Is the story of my life, and so many parents everywhere -- the kids are gone, their stuff is still here. 

Well written, packed with anecdotes to meet every circumstance, a manuscript for empty nesters, about vacant nests and those who have flown the coop. 

Enjoyed the read,  Happy to recommend  Empty Nesters: 101 Stories About Surviving and Thriving When the Kids Leave Home.