Last week, I felt stoic and enlightened about our youngest child leaving for college.

Seven days later, I feel like a liar.

I still stand by what I wrote earlier: I am excited for our children to experience everything the college years have to offer. I know we will still be involved and needed in their semi-independent lives. But I mistakenly thought I could intellectualize myself out of the emotional turbulence that accompanies this transition.

The morning before our flights to the kids' new horizons, I woke up feeling unsettled. They had to finish packing. The boy's friends were coming over for dinner and to hang out -- their last hurrah until Thanksgiving break.

Before I got out of bed, I texted a handful of close friends and my siblings.

"We're leaving tomorrow to drop both kids off at college, and I feel terrible," I wrote. I got empathetic responses from the moms who had recently experienced the same milestone, or were approaching it.

I curled up next to my husband and said, "I don't feel so great about this."

He made a sympathetic grunt and started snoring.

That's not to say that dads aren't emotionally affected by this process of letting go. My husband cried more than once after we dropped off our daughter two years ago, and he has warned me to expect similar tears when we leave our son in his dorm. He is not a crier, by the way.

After last week's column, I received several well-intentioned responses from fathers who could relate to my emotions. My colleague and friend Bill McClellan sent this note:

"The one thing I did miss when our youngest, Jack, went to college -- and I noticed it right away -- were the other parents. They were all casual friends, and they were all suddenly gone. Vanished. These were people, mostly dads, that I had stood on the sidelines with at soccer and tennis matches for years. I saw them every week, sometimes a couple of times a week. The kids kept up with each other on Facebook or whatever, but the parents did not. An entire part of my life that I had enjoyed but gave little thought to.

"Gone."

I hadn't even thought about the loss of friends we had made over the years of extracurricular activities. The message was a little bleak, Bill.

Another father wrote to share a similar experience: "After the fourth went away to college, I continued to attend the high school football games, etc. as I had done for a decade, thinking it would be the same. It wasn't. My youngest also happened to coincide with the youngest of all our friends. I sat alone, yet I persisted for the entire season."

This poignant scene -- a dedicated father sitting all alone game after game -- twisted a knife in my heart.

The dads were not helping.

That same morning, one of my friends shared a recent New York Times article saying we should lean into our negative emotions. It's healthier to acknowledge our feelings and let them pass, the research says. Feeling bad about feeling bad only makes you feel worse. That article gave me permission to feel a little off-kilter and sad.

I decided to make blueberry muffins and go to a yoga class. Maybe baking and moving would cheer me up. As I walked into the class, I told the instructor that I was leaving the next day to drop both our children at college for the first time.

The teacher teared up!

"I can't imagine," she said. "It must be so hard." This young yoga instructor seemed years away from college drop-offs. She asked if I was OK.

I guess, I said. Truthfully, I had been questioning my parenting choices on the way over. My parents had given me the option of applying to any college within the radius of a four-hour drive. Why had I expanded those boundaries for my own kids?

During the class, I focused on breathing and stretching.

Afterwards, the teacher hugged me. She said she would be sending positive vibes to me. I don't know if it was all the breathing or the hug, but I did feel considerably better.

The wisdom of the dads, younger parents, childless friends, the experts quoted in the Times -- it had all helped.

It's normal to feel nervous about big changes.

It's OK to let my heart break a little when I leave pieces of it behind.

When your youngest or only child is heading off to college, one question keeps cropping up: Are you ready for an empty nest?

I've heard this query in all its variations dozens of times over the past several months. We will be moving both our children into their dorms in a state hundreds of miles away on the same weekend later this month.

Friends with younger children look at me with a mix of concern and pity when they ask how I feel about my impending empty nest. I've taken to assuring those who ask that I'm fine. Everything's fine. We're all fine. I'm totally fine.

Maybe it doesn't sound so reassuring when I say it like that.

But part of me also wants to push back on the assumption built into the question. We've already had two years of being parents to our older college-aged child. While it isn't on a daily basis, this young adult still needs our guidance, support and financial backing. It doesn't feel like the child-rearing work is complete once tuition bills start arriving. In fact, it seems to usher in a time of greater parental anxiety and far less control.

I would never say this to a sleep-deprived, exhausted parent of toddlers, but it's more mentally taxing to be raising adolescents and college students than young kids. They are in a liminal space -- no longer under your direct supervision but not quite ready to fend for themselves. Their brains aren't fully developed yet, but they fully believe they are.

It's also around this time that you can appreciate things your children are able to do that you cannot. Our daughter can write college papers in French, a level of foreign language mastery I never achieved. Our son can play the trumpet, whereas I have no musical ability or talent. They both learned calculus in high school, which was beyond my comprehension even in college. Their interests, abilities and talents have diverged from our own, and that's pretty amazing to witness.

As they move closer to independence and adulthood, we're going to miss the events that filled our schedules for the past several years -- tennis matches, school plays, debate tournaments, band performances and all the practices, rehearsals, celebrations and get-togethers that came along with their activities.

But it's also interesting to discover how we will fill that newly found time.

We will miss the two extra places at the table at dinner and having someone around who was always willing to run to the grocery store or fix my computer issues. But I'm more excited to see how they are going to grow and the great adventures ahead in their lives.

An empty nest conjures images of a discarded, abandoned haunt, a former refuge that has been deserted. That's not the scene I'm preparing for around here. Their stuff is still all over our home. They parachute in as needed and have a soft place to land.

These are more like the Airbnb Years. Young people show up for holidays and respite and summer vacations. They bring youthful energy and dirty laundry and bigger grocery bills.

A wise mom whose children were all fully launched told me that the empty nest era doesn't begin until your children are financially independent and living on their own. A fair amount of therapy has taught me that you can change the way you feel about something if you can change the way you think about it.

So, that's the approach I'm taking to this so-called empty nest.

Feel free to check in with me next month after the big drop-off. I'm pretty sure I'll be fine.

The iconic pictures of summer -- sunsets, beaches, mountains and landmarks -- have filled my social media feed for weeks.

Pent-up demand for travel has delivered legions of airline passengers to far-off destinations. We joined these masses last month to take a family vacation to Europe, which we had postponed since 2021.

We enjoyed the sights in Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium before heading to England. Exactly 24 hours before our return from London, my husband attempted to check in for our flights. He kept getting an error message.

I tried the American Airlines app. It showed us leaving on a flight three hours later than the flight we had booked. This was strange. We are old-school enough that we print copies of our reservations before we travel, so we double-checked the paperwork. How were we mysteriously rebooked on a later flight? I messaged customer service, not knowing when (or if) I would get a reply.

Normally, the delay wouldn't be a big deal. But we had a connection through O'Hare airport in Chicago, where we would have to go through customs. This later flight left us only an hour and a half to make it. That seemed unlikely.

Were we victims of involuntary bumping? I learned this term during last year's Southwest Airlines meltdown, when thousands of flights were canceled. I watched TikTokkers explain that airlines owe passengers refunds and compensation when this happens.

We boarded our later flight, planning to hustle off the plane on the long-shot hope of making our connection. But when we landed in Chicago, our plane was stuck on the runway behind a broken-down tug and couldn't reach the gate.

When we finally got off the plane, we had less than an hour, and I gave up any hope when I saw the line at passport control. It was longer than most queues we've waited in at Disney. A young boy in the line, 8 or 9 years old, got so tired standing that he sat on the floor in between starts and stops.

He also threw up in front of me. On the floor. Twice.

When we finally made it to the customer service desk, long after our connecting flight had departed, I asked if they knew anything about our mysterious flight change or possible compensation for the delay.

They did not. The agent advised me to email the airline or go through social media. They did, however, pay for our hotel that night and give us $12 meal vouchers for dinner.

Twelve dollars for dinner in an airport felt like salt in the wound.

Given that the delay was happening on the return portion of our trip -- we weren't missing an important event or shortchanging our vacation -- I kept a healthy perspective on the inconvenience.

But that evening, things got more complicated. Our son woke up in the middle of the night with a piercing earache. The last time he flew with an ear infection, his eardrum ruptured, which he said was excruciating. Rather than risk that on our morning flight to St. Louis, my husband and son bought tickets on Amtrak.

My magnanimous attitude was wearing thin.

My daughter and I got on the flight the next morning. It was delayed on the runway. At that point, I wondered if the train would beat us home.

Thankfully, we all eventually made it back.

I received an email and phone call from American Airlines in response to my queries. Apparently, they had emailed both my husband and myself, weeks in advance, that our flight time had been changed. Strangely, neither of us could find these messages in our inboxes or junk folders. Then again, Congress recently held hearings on aliens and UFOs, so anything is possible, I guess.

They blamed the runway delay on air traffic control, and the broken tug on the airport. As far as rebooking us on an international flight with such a short connection time, they said it still met the minimum time regulations. The bottom line was that they didn't owe us a refund or any compensation.

They did say they would refund the two unused portions of the Chicago-to-St. Louis flights, and they offered each of us a travel credit that could add up to a single round-trip fare if we combined them all. It's better than nothing, I suppose.

In an era of airline chaos, I've adopted a mantra to help me deal with the stress of delays and cancellations, especially when traveling with kids: It could be worse.

Also, things are never as easy as they look on TikTok.