Coming and Going: Depression at the Empty Nest End of Motherhood

Editor's Note: Co-founder Jeannie Ralston wrote this piece about empty nest depression soon after starting NextTribe. We're happy to report that her devotion to you, our readers, has taken the sting out of her empty nest. We're re-running the piece because it's the time of year when many mothers face the blues of sending their children out into what can feel like—especially this year—a dangerous, unpredictable world.

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It’s not easy to make yourself laugh in the middle of an acute bout of depression. After my youngest son left for college, I was reeling from the emptiness in my house/life/heart. This was the same son that had led me to my first deep depression 17 years earlier (through no fault of his own). My hormones had gotten so whacked after he was born that I would have dragged myself through broken glass to get to some pharmaceutical relief. Once he was gone to college—a year early, to make matters worse—I had fallen into a similar darkness. A bookend to my life as a mother. The doctors called the earlier episode post-partum depression. We've all heard of that. This later attack, it occurred to me one day, could be called post-departum depression.