What’s it like to relocate once your children have left home?

Moving is widely considered one of life’s most stressful events. It’s physically demanding, requiring one to sort through possessions in order to decide what stays and what goes. Leaving a beloved home also takes an emotional toll. Then there’s the anxiety of adjusting to a new place.

Now consider how someone feels moving later in life, from the place they spent years raising their family. There are more possessions and a deeper emotional attachment to the place you’ve lived. How do you start over when you have such deep roots in the place you’ve lived for so many years?

Three women share the contours of their experience packing up and moving after their kids flew the nest.

We Just Left

Bracha grew up in Brooklyn and raised her family there. Then the children grew up, married, and left Brooklyn for Lakewood. After more than three decades of living in Brooklyn, Bracha left for Lakewood, too.

She says it wasn’t a big deal.

“I always knew I’d move someday,” she says. Her parents had done the same, selling their house in Brooklyn and moving to Lakewood. With the majority of her family settled there, it was only a matter of time before she left Brooklyn for Lakewood as well. She was just waiting for a push.

Then two things happened. First, their rav moved and their shul closed. They found another shul, but it just wasn’t the same. Then Bracha’s housekeeper of 32 years gave notice.

This gave her the impetus she needed. “She was such a part of my life. She was my right hand. Maybe it sounds crazy, but when she said she was leaving, it really threw me for a loop,” Bracha says. “We lived in a big house, and I couldn’t manage it on my own. I had to get out of there.”

The entire process took three months. Bracha’s housekeeper gave notice Shavuos time. They bought a house in Lakewood a week later. Shortly after, they put their house on the market and sold it within two weeks. They had to be out by September, and by then, they were already in Lakewood. Bracha says she’s never looked back.

Leah also moved after her children grew up and left home. While Leah’s move was more of a process, it also wasn’t the emotional upheaval one would expect. As a young couple, she and her husband had settled in Los Angeles, where they raised their family. For years, moving wasn’t on their radar. They operated a successful business that kept them so busy it was hard to take a vacation, let alone consider a move.

But then, all her children left home. The older ones got married and settled on the East Coast. The younger ones, all boys, left for yeshivah.

With all her children gone from Los Angeles, Leah and her husband started to think about leaving. At first, they considered Passaic, where their three married children lived. It was also close to the yeshivos where her single sons were learning.

Then they thought of Yerushalayim.

“Some people plan their whole lives thinking they’re going to Israel, but with us, it wasn’t like that,” Leah says. “We’d never discussed it.”

It became possible to run their business, which had always kept them tethered to Los Angeles, remotely. Leah had always wished one of her children would choose to settle in Los Angeles, but none had, and that made her feel less bound to the city. The more they thought about it, the more Leah and her husband came to think that living in Yerushalayim was an opportunity they couldn’t turn down.

“We went just to try it, saying maybe we’ll stay for six months, a year,” she says. “We didn’t sell our house in California.”

Once they made their decision to leave Los Angeles, it took some time to make the move. First, they had to find a place to live. They didn’t want to rent an apartment without having seen it first, and they couldn’t find the time to schedule a trip to scout things out. Then Leah’s niece, who lives in Israel, got engaged.

“This was the push we needed to go,” Leah says. “While we were there for the wedding, we looked all over. We checked out the different neighborhoods and decided where we wanted to live.”

They chose an apartment, but it fell through. But because they had just been there and had seen all the neighborhoods, they felt confident choosing another one based on the broker’s pictures.

Moving to Israel came at an opportune time for Leah. Her parents had already been living independently there in a retirement home. Right before her move, her father suffered a stroke, and her parents needed help.

“It was Hashgachah that brought us to Israel,” she says.