It’s been decades since I last boarded a school bus as a student, but seeing those behemoths swarming down my street today like giant yellow jackets still made my stomach knot up. I no longer have homework or new teachers to worry about, or even my kids’ homework or teachers to concern me. Yet that old, familiar mix of melancholy and dread returns every August as soon as the lunchboxes and thermoses show up in the supermarket.

September has always gotten to me. It must have something to do, I guess, with being reminded of the inexorable march of time. Unlike many of the moms I know, I never counted the days until summer ended or kicked up my heels in unfettered joy at the prospect of “me” time. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; I was just too caught up in the sadness of letting go to feel excited. While the other PTA parents were toasting their freedom with Mimosas at a neighbor’s annual, first-day-of-school brunch after dropping their kids off at the bus stop, I was holding back the tears.

I often think about a conversation I had with a friend when my oldest daughter was two and his only child was about to graduate from high school. Looking wistfully at my curly-haired toddler, he said: “Enjoy it now. It goes so fast.” At the time, caught up as I was in the bedtime battles, temper tantrums, and endless viewings of Disney’s Cinderella, I brushed off his advice. But he was so right. That strong-willed two-year-old has, herself, long since graduated from high school, and she went back to school today—as a second-year law student.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not always wallowing in nostalgia. When I’m not sniffing my kids’ pillows like a rooting sow,  trying to catch  lingering whiffs of their scents, I do see some advantages to an empty nest. I don’t have to pack lunches. I can relax at the end of a long working day without having to start fashioning igloos out of marshmallows and decorator’s icing (yes, I really did this). And my husband and I can eat dinner together at 9:00 pm without hearing any complaints. Besides, the dogs make great child surrogates—superior, even, to their real counterparts in some ways.  They rarely talk back, don’t leave their clothes all over the floor, and never keep me awake into the early morning hours, unable to fall asleep until I hear a key in the front door.

And, best of all, they won’t ever grow up and leave home.