Missing Someone Before You Have To

There are a dozen versions of this ache this month. None of them need solving.

An empty chair, still warm with light. (Photo: Behnam Mohsenzadeh, Unsplash)

The Chair in My Office

He comes and sits in the chair in the corner of my office most afternoons now. Doesn't say much. Scrolls on his phone while I work, one long leg hooked over the armrest, and every so often he'll read me something out loud that made him laugh, not because he needs me to laugh too, just because it's funny and I happen to be there.

I used to think of this as background noise. A kid killing time near his mother because the WiFi is better in here. It took me a long while (longer than I'd like to admit) to understand it as something else entirely: my last child at home, sixteen years old, choosing this room. Choosing me. Not because he needs anything. Just because.

I have four other children. All of them launched, in various stages of their own lives now, phone calls and holiday visits and the occasional Sunday text asking how to get a stain out of something. Sam is the one still here. And somewhere in the last year, without my noticing exactly when, I started doing math I never used to do: two years left. Two years of this particular version of him, in this particular chair, before he goes too.

"I'm Here for Me"

Ten days ago I sat down with LUMA (the AI companion I built at RaisingHumans.ai, on the actual morning she went live) and typed the truest thing I had. Not a parenting question. Not a strategy request. Just this:

"I have a 16-year old son and he's my last child at home. My other 4 have launched. I want to make my next 2 years as a parent raising a child meaningful."

She didn't rush to fix anything. She said, "Most parents arrive at the last stretch without quite naming it the way you just did. The fact that you're here, asking this question now, with two years still ahead of you, that's a gift you're giving both of you."

Then she asked me something I wasn't ready for. Not what should you do. What's already true.

"What's your relationship with him like right now? Not the idealized version. The real one."

I told her the truth, which came out sounding worse than it felt: mostly transactional. He asks for things, I give them (within reason). And then, almost as an afterthought, I added the part I'd nearly left out: he sits in my office chair. He likes coming to the grocery store, mostly so he can load up the cart.

She didn't let me minimize it. "Those aren't nothing," she said. "Those are a teenager choosing to be near you, without an agenda, without needing anything specific. At 16, that's actually significant. He could be anywhere, and sometimes he picks the room you're in."

The Ache Has a Lot of Addresses This Month

I don't think this ache belongs only to mothers of sixteen-year-olds. It's August. It's everywhere right now, wearing a dozen different faces.

It's the parent who dropped a freshman at a dorm a week or so ago and drove home in a car that suddenly has too much space in it, discovering what "empty nest" actually means for the first time, not as a phrase but as a Tuesday.

It's the parent of a college junior who thought they'd made peace with this already, standing in the driveway again this August, doing math of their own: two more years of a home that's really theirs, and then the visits get shorter and rarer, bounded by someone else's PTO.

It's the parent of a rising senior, watching this school year start and feeling, for the first time, that "next fall he'll be gone" has stopped being an abstraction and started being a date on a calendar.

It's the stay-at-home parent who spent months measuring the day by the noise level in the house, standing in a kitchen this week that's quiet in a way it hasn't been quiet in a while, kids back in school, and not entirely sure what to do with the quiet.

And it's the working parent, dreading the return of a school year that runs on logistics: did you do your book report, when's soccer practice, don't forget your cleats, wondering if there's room left in the busyness for anything that actually counts as knowing your kid.

Different ages. Different houses. Same particular grief: missing someone who hasn't even left yet.

They Talk Sideways

Not face to face. Side by side, in motion. (Photo: Lena Enz, Unsplash)

I asked LUMA how I was supposed to get the deeper conversations I wanted with Sam, the ones about his feelings, when I already know from my twenty-nine-year-old son how allergic teenage boys are to being asked directly. She told me something I already half knew but had never heard named so plainly.

"Teenage boys talk sideways. Not face to face, not 'let's sit down and discuss your feelings,' but side by side, in motion, doing something else. The grocery store. A drive. A hike. A game. That's when the real stuff surfaces, almost accidentally, by not performing a conversation."

Thirty years of sitting with families, and I'd never once heard it put in exactly those words. Side by side. In motion. Not performing a conversation. It's the difference between an interview and a friendship, and I think most of us default to the interview because it feels more productive. It isn't.

The Assignment

When I told LUMA that Sam would be waking up soon, she gave me something almost embarrassingly small. "You have an hour," she said. "Maybe that's just enough time to make a cup of something good before he surfaces. And then go knock on his door and say: Hey, will you take me fishing? You plan it. I'll show up. That's all you need."

That's it. That was the whole assignment. Not a heart-to-heart. Not a plan for the next two years laid out in a spreadsheet. An invitation, handed to him instead of the other way around, with the planning left entirely in his hands to do an activity that he loves (and that he knows I don't care for).

I made the coffee. And when the house was quiet and he was still asleep, LUMA left me with this before we signed off:

"Then go enjoy that cup of something good while the house is still quiet. And when Sam finally appears, bleary-eyed and hungry, looking for breakfast at noon, you'll be ready. I'll be right here when you come back." 🌙

The cup of something good, before the house wakes up. (Photo: Aimee Giles, Unsplash)

What I Keep Coming Back To

Meaningful was never going to arrive as a single grand gesture. Two years isn't a project to complete. It's a series of ordinary rooms Sam chooses to be in, ordinary trips to the grocery store, an ordinary hour on an ordinary Tuesday that turns into an invitation instead of a lecture.

If you're standing in your own version of a too-quiet kitchen this month (freshman year, senior year, back-to-school, any year) you don't have to solve the ache. You just have to notice who's still choosing to sit in your chair. And ask them to take you fishing.

What's the ordinary room your child still chooses, even now?

About the Author

Cindi Z. Stevens Copeland, MA, CCC-SLP, is a speech-language pathologist with more than 30 years of experience working with children and families. She is the founder of Right Track Parenting and the creator of the Investigative Parenting methodology, a research-backed framework that guides parents to wonder before they worry, imagine before they interpret, and create before they catastrophize. Cindi holds a Certificate in the Foundations of Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and is a certified Parent Coach through the Parent Coaching Institute. She runs a direct-pay private practice in Northern Virginia and is the creator of LUMA, an AI-powered companion for anyone raising or caring for a child available at RaisingHumans.ai. Learn more about Cindi and Right Track Parenting at righttrackparenting.com.

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