Newsweek's Anna Quindlen recently wrote an essay, which made me stop to savor the time with my two small children. Oftentimes, when we are stressed and exhausted, we forget that these little people do grow up -- and find their own way.

A friend whose children are just a little older than my own told me once that parents fool themselves, pulling away from the quad with an empty SUV and tears in their eyes, that sending a child to college constitutes the great separation. The real breach, she said, came after the car, full once more, left the quad with a mortarboard and a diploma tossed in the back seat.

During college there were those long winter breaks, the occasional weekend, the summers in which the high-school friends reappeared at the breakfast table, if pancakes at 1 p.m. counts as breakfast. But then, college over, real life began. The unfamiliar names of workplace acquaintances. The inconvenient or nonexistent holidays that come with the bottom rungs of the employment ladder. The tiny apartment in the new neighborhood. The frying pan...

First they are helpless. The rocking, the burping, the bathing, the nursing. The endless nursing. And then they learn to use a spoon, and then a knife, and chopsticks, and the oven, and a panini press. I don't believe food is love, precisely, but I believe everything looks better in the morning if there are eggs Benedict. I learned to cook from my mother, me at the stove, her in a wheelchair, when I was doing a college year abroad in the country of chemo. Her message was pretty clear: a full plate is what you will need to survive...

First they are in your arms constantly, so that your joints go stiff and your back aches. Then they hold your hand, then tolerate an arm around the shoulder, then shrug and pull away. And finally there's that hug that always seems to vibrate with the adrenaline of near-escape. They recede into the distance, leaving vapor trails of memory and dinner for two, a culinary trick I cannot master. After my mother died we had a housekeeper who had been the house mother at a fraternity; she made smothered chicken and pork chops with onions and pepper steak in quantities so enormous that it looked as though Congress was expected to drop by. I merely make enough food for eight, which is what I always did when I was cooking for five. It is a good thing my husband likes leftovers.

Chris still comes for dinner sometimes, for the kinds of meals you can't make in a frying pan: beef stew, short ribs, spaghetti and meatballs. He eats the way you eat when you've been cooking for yourself, with a sigh and a smile. His room upstairs has not changed much, except that it echoes because some of the furniture is gone, and sometimes he goes up there to see if there's anything he's forgotten. But eventually he stands and says, "I think I'm going home now." How would he know how that feels to me? First the cradle, then the crib, the big-boy bed, the posters on the wall, the prom pictures on the desk. And then the U-Haul and the tiny kitchen with the lone pan. His home now is elsewhere.

This piece left me in tears. I love Anna Quindlen! I thought I would share...

Do you remember the first time you came home after going away to college? I do. It was Thanksgiving weekend and I surprised my parents by flying across the country (they thought I was staying in Boston for the holiday). So I came home to lots of tears and hugs and-- SURPRISE!! Someone else living in my bedroom.

Having other people living in our house was nothing unusual. Growing up, we had a succession of live-in babysitters, usually young cousins who just immigrated from Mexico. When I left for school, my parents opened their home to another cousin and her newlywed husband-- but forgot to tell me. Oops!

I wasn't too fazed by the change, since my dear aunt Gloria lived just down the street. I bunked with her that first night home, giving the interlopers a chance to clear out of my room for the weekend. But
according to this article, many young people are traumatized by such a change:

“(Mom) kind of guided me upstairs like a little child,” said Maeve, now a 19-year-old sophomore at Middlebury College in Vermont. “I just looked at my bedroom and froze.”

The room where she’d spent the first 18 years of her life was unrecognizable. Her ’N Sync poster was gone. So was the collage of her high school friends. What she found instead was the new guest room, a “Martha Stewart bed and breakfast,” as her mother described it. The walls had been repainted, the carpet had been changed and the happy clutter of her childhood had been replaced by about 40 bone china butter dishes that her mother had purchased on eBay and mounted on the wall. “The first question I asked was, who lives here?” Maeve McGilloway said, “and she said, ‘You do,’ and pointed to this really little vintage Middlebury postcard on the wall, like this little Middlebury postcard was supposed to represent me.”

Ouch.

Adolescent psychologists disagree on how best to navigate the empty nest. Some say that demolishing your kid's comfort zone will help nudge him toward independence. Others say that fledgling freshmen are already grappling with enough change:

Parents of Kenyon freshmen are warned at an orientation seminar against stopping at Ikea on the way home. “Honor that space at least through Christmas break, and then make some decisions as a family,” said Alicia Dugas, Kenyon’s assistant dean of students. “Every year, inevitably you have a student come back during spring break and say: You’ll never guess what my parents did.”

I think there's got to be a happy medium between making your kid's room a shrine/time capsule and turning it an art studio the minute he leaves for orientation. I want my daughter to feel welcome, even after she leaves the nest. I firmly believe having a sense of belonging, a place to call "home," does wonders for one's self-esteem and security. I found it infinitely easier to leave my comfort zone-- live in different cities, accept challenging internships-- knowing I was welcome home should anything go wrong.

Other than two summers during college and a few winter breaks, I never really did live at home again. But to this day, when I think of "home," I picture my parents' house. When I'm asked my hometown, it's the town my parents live in.

My childhood bedroom, which has long been vacant now, looks remarkably similar today: the furniture is the same and pictures of me, my husband and daughter cover almost every surface. I don't know what happened to my pictures of Marilyn Monroe or the old Far Side cartoons I used to clip from the newspaper and tape to my closet wall. And the closets and drawers are now filled with my mom's clothes.

But the bottom drawer of a nightstand is still brimming with old pictures, letters and tchotchkes of mine. Every once in a while I pull some out and reminisce, and swear that some day soon, I'll take them home and store them in a safe place.

But the truth is, I like knowing that one little corner of my mom and dad's house remains mine.

What do you think, MotherTalkers? Am I pathetically nostalgic? Should a child's room become fair game the minute he or she leaves for college? And for those moms with older children, what do you plan to do with their rooms once they leave for school?