On losing children

Very beginning of this year, on the morning of this new year's day, I told my daughter it was about time she got independent and lived alone. She said she had been thinking of the same. She left home and started her new life in a small apartment two months ago. It was rather unceremonious event than I had expected. She grew away from us. It was just that. She will make her living. Sometimes I wonder how she is doing. But nothing more than that. Part of the reason is... she comes back every weekend...
Saying ただいまぁー, she comes back. No weekend has passed without her coming back home. I once told her jokingly that she should rather say お邪魔します on coming home instead of ただいま, because this is not her house any more, implying that she should come back less frequently. Since then she comes back saying おじゃましまーす... every week.
Recently I sometimes remember when she was a first or second grade elementary school girl. Every morning she left home with me to go to school. We walked together to the station where we parted. There she took bus and I took train. I stood there for a while to see her off walking along the other side of the street for the bus stop. She was unaware of me. Her profile always looked as if she was lost in something. It was different from the look she showed to family. In the school uniform, leaning forward a little with her school bag heavily on her back, she looked so small and vulnerable. She had her own life and she might be trying to make out her way of life. I felt a growing process was surely at work in her.
This image has flashed back unexpectedly and repeatedly since she left our home.
This week my son left for UK for three-week home stay. We are left at home alone, three of us. At dinner table, my mother said "We are going to be like this more and more often."
"Not bad." I said. "It's quiet."
"Too quiet." she said, to which my wife totally agreed.
That's how we are dependent on our children just as they are on us. Maybe it's us who must be really weaned. What's life without kids? Here it is, there is our life. It's all up to us.