The Brownie Incident (or How My Body Outsmarted My Brain)

Letting Go of Adult Children in Midlife

The empty nest invasion is coming to an abrupt end.

Yes, I know, he’s been here for months. And yes, I’ve had more than a few meltdowns, some visible, some purely internal, about the glacial pace of this so-called “transition” from college kid to “real adult.”

But now it’s here. Finally.

And I’m in pain, the kind that rips your insides to shreds, quietly. The kind that hides beneath pride and joy and excitement for his next chapter. The kind that makes you proud and broken in the same breath.

My son is changing his mailing address, permanently, and while I wanted this (really, I did), I didn’t bargain for an entirely new state and city to go with it.

So here we are, on the eve of his final packing. Piles of “keep,” “donate,” and “who-knows” are scattered around the house, the air thick with decisions about what goes to his new home and what lingers behind.

And things do linger. I know this. I was in my thirties before my parents’ “get your shit out of here” threats were loud enough to make me comply.

So while my frontal lobe was busy with logistics, boxing, labeling, and hunting through dusty attics for old glassware, my reptilian brain went rogue. Somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, I found myself baking.

The Brownie Breakdown

Brownies.

Seems innocent enough, right? Except I am not a baker. Never have been. Yet there I was, dumping extra chocolate chips into a box mix like it was my life raft.

And then I ate that tray. Almost all of it. Three days, one woman, one pan. About 2,000 extra calories a day, give or take. By the end of it, I was up three pounds and down one layer of denial.

The pause came only when I caught myself mid-bite, thinking, What is the deal with all this brownie eating?

Turns out, brownies were my thing when I was breastfeeding my son. Every feeding, every late-night rocking session, came with a warm, huge square of chocolate and a freezer-cold glass of whole milk. He got the breast milk; I got the serotonin.

The Body Remembers

So of course my body, wiser and more primal than my mind, knew what to do when it sensed another kind of birth coming. Because that’s what this is: another labor. Only this time there’s no epidural, no nurse, no congratulatory balloons.

This is the birth where they leave for good.

Sure, they visit. But the real move, the one where they set up a life that doesn’t orbit yours, that’s the one that tears through you quietly, like an old wound remembering how to ache. There’s no car seat now, no way to buckle them in, no guarantee you can keep them safe once they drive away. You just have to trust that what you built holds.

So I guess the brownies were my oxytocin. My body’s way of saying, you’ve done this before, you can do it again.

Turns Out Falling Apart Runs in the Family

So maybe it runs in the family, this business of falling apart quietly when someone leaves. When my brother, my parents’ firstborn, moved out for the first time, my dad decided to mow the lawn. Classic distraction tactic. Unfortunately, he was so distraught and distracted that he forgot to turn the mower off before manually adjusting the blade height.

Yes, this was the seventies, when everything was manual, even common sense. I remember my mom wiping up blood from the kitchen floor while my dad, calm as ever, suggested that maybe she’d be more useful behind the wheel driving him to the ER. He lost part of a finger that day. Apparently, we all have our own way of processing departure. His was a power tool. Mine was a pan of brownies.

The tray is empty now, washed, dried, and tucked away. Maybe I’ll bake again someday. Maybe not. But for now, I’m grateful to my instincts for finding a way to hold me together when everything in me was coming apart.

Motherhood, it seems, never really leaves your system. It just changes flavor.

P.S. If you’ve ever eaten your feelings in brownie form, welcome to the club. The membership fee is three pounds and a clean baking tray. Join me in the Sunday RoundUp at Kuel Life, where we talk about the real stuff women over 50 actually live through.

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