The first thing I do each day when I wake up is to reach for my cellphone and text "Good morning" to my two daughters, who are both away at college. Sometimes they text me back.

In this first fall living in an empty nest, the text has become my ritual, my connection and, yes, my acknowledgment that life is different. The Little Darlings are grown now.

I’m coping. Really, I am.

To be honest, I should have seen this coming. I was even warned it would happen, that it would arrive like a sucker punch.

One friend said, in the months prior to the first of my daughters leaving for college, that I was a big softy. "You’re going to be a mess," she concluded.

How could it be otherwise? When you have children in your house for 20 years and suddenly they’re several thousand miles away … well, the resulting quiet they leave behind can be unsettling.

So many things changed. I missed the clutter. I missed the friends who used to visit. I missed the arguments about how episodes of "America’s Next Top Model" had taken over the DVR. I missed sitting down for dinner and talking about the day.

I missed … them.

Communicating via Skype was nice, but sometimes it made me miss them even more. Once, we set up an iPad near our youngest daughter’s spot at the dinner table and chatted with her as we ate. When she turned 18 a week ago, we watched her open her birthday presents.

There should have been ample time to prepare for an empty nest because our ranks thinned in 2010 when Firstborn left for college in Tacoma, Wash. But her younger sister, who is now in Wisconsin, kept us busy. There was no gradual transition, just goodbye.

Mrs. G. did a victory dance, but I remember thinking, What now?

Of course, parents everywhere go through the same experience each fall, so I turned to a few who I knew to see how they had adjusted. Each of them had done a lot of child-rearing.

Jo Ann Viernes, a Hawaii Kai mother of three, sent her last daughter off to the University of Oregon two years ago. Kelly, who went to high school with my oldest daughter, was her youngest by several years.

"Coming home and seeing the house empty, for some reason I wasn’t as sad as I was with the two other girls," said Viennes, a letter carrier with the U.S. Postal Service. "I knew it was empty-nest time. When I tell you that I was happy, I am not exaggerating."

Her oldest, Kimberly, was born in 1980, and children had been a part of the household for 30 years.

"I felt so liberated," Viernes said. "I felt like, wow, this is wonderful."

She didn’t have to get up early to make breakfast, didn’t have to worry about sharing the house with anyone but her husband, and she didn’t have to pester anyone to pick up after themselves. She and her husband, Ricky, reveled in the quiet of their home.

"It was a good time for me and Ricky to kind of say, ‘Oh, this was what it was like before the kids came,’" she said. "We had forgotten what that was like."

They were having so much fun that they sent out Christmas cards with a photo of just the two of them and the message, "We’re empty nesters!" It was the first time their daughters had not been on the card. The girls cried foul.

But the empty nest didn’t last long. About four months after Kelly left for college, Jo Ann’s mother moved in.

Another friend, Kim Okuma, sent the youngest of her three children to college this fall and was surprised at her reaction to an empty nest. She and husband, Wade, dropped off Kaylin for her freshman year at Drake University and on the same trip deposited older sister Chelsy at Western Oregon University, where she is a senior. (Their older brother, Noel, is out of college.)

"I explained to Wade it was like I was going home but I was homesick," said Okuma, an office assistant for the state Department of Education. "When you are homesick, you are away from familiar things, from where everything is easy. But I was going home and it was different. No one was home. What were we going to do? It was different. And lonely."

The Okumas crossed this key threshold of parenting slowly. Because both of their daughters play on college soccer teams, the couple took several trips to see them play. They won’t have that option in the spring semester, which looms larger and longer, Okuma said.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the empty nest, and it makes Okuma laugh pretty hard when she describes it. Because her daughters spent a lot of time on soccer teams when they were growing up, she and Wade have a large extended soccer family, which includes a few parents whose nests are also empty for the first time.

So the Okumas and crew did what they always have done. They went to a game — a college soccer game.

"It was hilarious," Okuma said. "We were all laughing all together. It was like the lonely-hearts club. We were all childless with nothing to do, and we went to watch a soccer game."

I liked what they had to say, that you could enjoy the freedom even if you felt a little melancholy at the kids’ departure. That it was all right to admit it.

Of course, it has to be noted that Mrs. G. hasn’t struggled with this, not once. She’s tougher than I am. But she had goals for this new chapter in our lives.

After her self-proclaimed emancipation, Mrs. G. reminded me again — as she had for several months — that she was done cooking dinner on a regular basis. She pointed out this was an opportunity for us to get to know each other again.

I liked the sound of that, but I’ll confess it wasn’t easy at first. Me asking Mrs. G. what she wanted to do wasn’t what she had in mind. I had to come up with the ideas, and I was woefully out of practice. And there were a few dinners early on where we ate in silence.

But we’ve also gone to the beach to read. We’ve seen more movies in the last few months than in the last few years. We watched movies from the couch — on school nights. I’m serious. We’ve eaten takeout. We’ve walked to the shopping center for coffee.

And, yes, I now cook on Sunday nights. It’s a weekly humiliation, but at least no one’s gotten sick on my meatloaf, Indian curry, pork chops or carrot cake.

I post photos on Facebook so my daughters can see my evolution. They always hit the "like" button.