Heidi Stevens: When an empty nest looms in the near distance, even little parenting chores feel like a privilege

Heidi Stevens, Tribune News Service on Apr 2, 2026

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I was cleaning blue fabric dye out of my giant chili pot the other morning when it hit me that some of my favorite parts about parenting — the parts that hit me like a gust of wind and make my chest tighten in a good way and my eyes well up in a where-did-that-come-from way — are the parts I was least expecting. Wasn’t actually expecting at all. Had no framework for expecting.

Like cleaning blue fabric dye out of a giant chili pot.

I’ll explain.

My son is a junior in high school. College is on the horizon and on our minds and in my inbox, reminding me to sign up for the open house and schedule the campus visit and register for the test prep and start the long, delicate, lucky process of learning to see my favorite person on Earth a little bit less.

My daughter is in her second year of college. I’ve done a junior year. I’ve started the long, delicate, lucky process of learning to see my favorite person on Earth a little bit less. (You get as many favorite people on Earth as you want, by the way. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.)

This time isn’t any easier.

Little moments have started taking on that beautiful, terrifying weight of anticipation: How many more of these do I get? Am I savoring this one enough? Am I asking the right things? Noticing the right things? What will I look back on and be absolutely shocked to kind of long for? I used to count traffic on the Kennedy as life’s nadir. A month after my daughter left for college, I would’ve paid $5,000 to sit with her in traffic.

Which brings me back to the chili pot and the dye.

My son plays lacrosse. When he’s not playing lacrosse, he’s stringing lacrosse heads. Or dyeing lacrosse heads. Or dyeing and then stringing lacrosse heads. Dying lacrosse heads is a multi-step process that involves a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and a giant pot filled with Rit Dye and some other steps I am not sure about but feel comfortable never learning.

Shortly after my kids and I moved into our current apartment, I lamented our lack of a proper chili pot. My daughter ordered one online and when it arrived it was so enormous that it didn’t fit inside any of our cabinets and would hold an amount of chili that my family would never, under any circumstances we could imagine, consume. So we stuck it on a high, unreachable shelf and mostly turned to it for comic relief.

Turns out it’s the perfect size for dyeing lacrosse heads.

And it turns out when you’re scrubbing the last remnants of navy blue Rit from it the morning after a late-night dye job, your mind starts to wander and collect and enumerate the things that brought you to this moment.

The drives to practice. Lacrosse practice, sure. But also baseball practice and flag football practice and cross-country practice and that one experimental jaunt into floor hockey. Heck, debate team practice. Flute practice. (Why corral a wandering mind?)

The games. Games in the snow. Games in the rain. Games in the sun. Games in the wind. Games in different neighborhoods and cities and states. Games that ended in tears. Games that ended in the kind of joy you didn’t really understand until you had a sports-loving kid.

The coaches. Coaches who yelled. Coaches who inspired. Coaches who motivated. Coaches who lost the plot. Coaches who turned out to be the exact person your kid needed in the exact moment he needed him. Coaches who, in the best cases (and there have been so many best cases) taught your kid to win magnanimously and lose graciously and compete whole-heartedly. Coaches who, every time, could have been doing anything else with their hours besides investing them in young people.

The parents. The ones who became dear friends and the ones who you knew not to sit near and the ones you could always count on to patiently explain why that was a penalty.

The snacks. The laundry. The cleats. The mud. The little beads of artificial turf that you find in random places months after the season ended.

It all races through your head — through my head — and adds up to such a gorgeous, complicated, joyful, messy story. And I can’t believe I got to help write it. And star in it. And there aren’t that many chapters left.

You just have no idea, when you’re younger, that you’ll kind of enjoy scrubbing fabric dye off a chili pot one day because your brain can’t conjure a scenario whereby you’d be doing such a thing. Can’t conjure the circumstances and rituals and minutiae and people who brought you to that particular chore/privilege.

And I guess that’s the magic of it all. That we get to create and cultivate and cherish these moments that we didn’t even know we wanted. And now we kind of live for them.