The Loud Quiet - Empty Nest Living

Getting adult children to follow through gets complicated when you're still paying for part of their lives. Some of what we ask our grown kids to do affects us directly. Some of it we'd simply like to see happen. And some of it is none of our business. We sort those requests into three categories, and each one calls for a different response. We're in the middle of this at our house. Ou...

Supporting your college student looks different once midterm grades are in and the semester heads into its home stretch. Deonne Yeager is Director of Parent and Family Programs at the University of South Carolina, with 26 years in higher education. She sees the same thing every fall. Students who always made straight A's get their first big grade back, and panic sets in. Some college classes o...

Impulse shopping has never been easier, and in the empty nest it can sneak up on you fast. In this true confessions episode, Clancy asks: am I addicted to shopping, or is it just a phase? A new season, a closet she's rebuilding from scratch, a TikTok feed full of cute finds, and one-tap Apple Pay all lined up to fill our porch with boxes. Nothing on its own was expensive. Together, it was a lo...

Acts of kindness are the small, observant choices that take about 30 seconds and can turn someone's day around. So why do they feel so rare right now? On Clancy's morning walks, only about 60 percent of people wave or say hello back. Commutes turn into races, a friendly note on a windshield feels like a scam, and the algorithm keeps feeding us the worst of each other. If you've been wo...

Mid-semester is when a lot of families start asking these questions. What can a parent do after three weeks of silence? Why do so many students start struggling right around week six? And how do you support your student without stepping back into the driver’s seat? Annamarie Tellez is the director for parent and family programs at the University of Arizona, where our daughter is a senior. Annamari...

We just got back from Arizona. Another parents' weekend, another hike into the Grand Canyon. That trip sent us straight back to Episode 9, so we're bringing it back as a Greatest Hits episode. We recorded it in our first few months as empty nesters, a mile and a half down the trail, not even sure the mics were on. If you can, turn on the video. It was Tanner's last parents' weekend...

Rick gave Clancy a trip to Los Angeles for Christmas, and we finally took it in September. This is our first trip as just the two of us since Mexico last year. The whole thing was built around one concert. The biggest highlight came from a tour Clancy found the Tuesday before we left, after our original plan fell through. That tour got us into hidden places on the Sunset Strip and the stories behi...

John Infortunio writes about his father's Alzheimer's, and he chose fiction over memoir to do it. On this episode, he tells us why a character can hold what a memoir can't. John is a lifelong educator, a native Brooklynite, and the author of two novels drawn from his own life. We get into how he balances that authenticity with fiction, what actually happens in his editing process, and...

This is the second half of their relationship check in, questions Rick and Clancy come back to when it's been too long since the last one. They continue with the 5 love languages conversation, their lowest-ranked ones this time, and move into bigger questions about what the next five to ten years look like. It's easy to assume things are fine because nothing's actively wrong. A check-i...

What does a relationship check-in look like in the empty nest? This episode, Rick and Clancy go through their actual check-in questions. Unrehearsed. Real reactions. They cover togetherness versus independence, what's working day to day and what they'd change, and whether they still talk about anything besides logistics and the kids. Then they get into the five love languages, comparing re...

Your student isn't the only one at college who has someone in their corner, you might too, if you know who to call. Heather Deere spends her days on the other end of the phone calls families make when they can't tell if their student is really doing okay three states away. She's the Director of Family Engagement & Student Affairs Communications at William & Mary. In this episod...

A solo move-in for Teagan and a podcasting conference happened back to back this month, and together they got Rick and Clancy thinking bigger than they have in a while. The move-in was their tenth, routine on paper, but still came with new lessons. The conference is where the muse appeared. Conversations with fellow attendees, several of them empty nesters themselves, left Rick and Clancy with a c...

Rick and Clancy started rewriting their wills this year, and that's what led them to Jill McClennen, a death doula, who says you don't have to be dying to use one. "It's also that with a death doula, you don't actually have to be dying to use a death doula. We really actually are probably more effective if we would work with people earlier on." - Jill In this episode: -Wh...

Busy, or full? Rick and Clancy started using that second word on purpose this episode, and it changes how the whole conversation flows. Rick names a trap he's been stuck in for years: believing that once you get through the next big thing, life will finally calm down. It never does. He's not convinced he'll fix that either, because he knows who he is. Clancy comes up with a different w...

Move-in day never quite goes the way you expect, even after doing it more than once. Rick and Clancy walk through what actually shifts each time, from how much to help unpacking a dorm room to when to step in on a rough roommate situation. "Help them, but only as much as they want to be helped" comes up early, and it holds up through the rest of the conversation. Budgeting gets its own s...

How is the nest empty if you're still living in it? That question from Hanna Bankier is why we brought her on this week. Hanna runs Birdie Launcher, helping parents navigate launching their kids, and themselves, into whatever comes next. Her focus isn't the packing list. It's the relationship that has to get rebuilt once the packing's done. Hanna's website is a great place to s...

We went into a marriage conference this weekend thinking we didn't really need it. Decades of marriage will do that to you. That assumption got proven wrong fast, especially in a breakout session on parenting adult children. Then we capped the weekend off with something completely impulsive that had nothing to do with marriage advice and everything to do with a nineteen dollar ticket. If you w...

We set an alarm for five forty this week. After a night out. Nobody made us do that. We keep saying we have more freedom than ever, so why does this summer feel busier than any before it. Turns out the empty nest doesn't erase old habits, it just removes the excuse for them. We're still keeping a schedule neither of us actually needs anymore. "We have this productivity addiction that...

Rick and Clancy are both mid-recovery and mid-appointment season, and this one gets into what that's actually like in our fifties. Between the two of them, this year alone brought a procedure Clancy had been putting off for years, a colonoscopy, and more skin checks than either of them expected to need yet. Some of it was elective. Some of it wasn't. Neither of them feels their age, but th...

Communication breaks down in the same few places for almost every couple. This episode is about finding those places before they turn into a fight. Rebecca Mullen joins Rick and Clancy to talk about the three roles inside a marriage, partner, lover, and friend, and how easily one of them gets neglected once kids leave the house. The conversation moves into why couples assume their partner can read...

The stadium they've seen a hundred times looks completely different through a stranger's eyes. Rick and Clancy talk World Cup fever in Dallas, from Rick's first match in 1994 to watching tourists fall for ranch dressing and a screen they stopped noticing years ago. The conversation moves through ticket prices, FIFA's reputation, and how different the sport felt before the US starte...

Three years into running a podcast together, Rick and Clancy are together constantly. That didn't stop them from arguing about cottage cheese, a dinner reservation in Spain, and a birthday gift for their son. None of those arguments were actually about the thing they were about. In this episode, Rick and Clancy walk through three real arguments unrehearsed, raw, on mic, in real time. What come...

Rick and Clancy just got back from ten days in Spain with both kids. This episode is about what family travel actually looks like when the kids are adults. The shared memories are still the point. They always have been. But the logistics are different now. The scheduling is a negotiation. The kids have opinions about destinations. And somewhere between the Sagrada Familia and the Picasso Museum, y...

Almost sixty percent of Michelle Puccinelli's virtual assistant students are empty nesters. She didn't design it that way. They just kept showing up. Michelle runs Virtual Work Studio, a marketing agency with a training program that prepares women to work as specialized virtual assistants. When she built the program, she was thinking career changers and moms returning to the workforce. Wha...

10 Travel Tips...This is a Greatest Hits episode. It originally aired as Episode 87 in May 2025 and we're bringing it back because the tips hold up. Ten travel tips from our trip to Germany. Not a general list. Specific things we did, tools we used, and habits that made the trip work. A lot of it applies well beyond Germany. The thread running through all of it is flexibility. The empty nest c...