HOME ALONE.(The Talk of the Town)

When Janine Reimen's daughter left for college, in the fall of 2002, Reimen was surprised to find that the filial departure did not bring grief to her and her husband, as she had anticipated; instead, it brought a measure of guilty exhilaration. "The moment she left, we were, like, this is great," Reimen said recently. But Reimen, who lives in Tribeca and is a social worker, suspected that other parents of recently departed children might need help adjusting to the novelty of solitude, and so this fall she started a support group for empty nesters. The group has been meeting on Tuesday evenings in a basement conference room at the Synagogue for the Arts, on White Street. There, amid shelves of prayer books and a little used ark, the mothers have been discussing the drama of the shifted child.

"My twenty-four-year-old son graduated from school three years ago, and this year he got a sublet in the same building that I live in," one mother explained during a recent meeting. "He's out of the house, but he didn't go too far. And already I feel the pangs of his going somewhere else." The fact that that somewhere else would be law school did not, she said, compensate for the impending loss.

A couple of the mothers were merely anticipating the unhappy day when their adult children would move on to adult lives. This was a move that, since the children already had full-service accommodations in an exclusive, expensive neighborhood, did not seem particularly imminent, crummy apartment shares in Astoria being for those unfortunate would-be New Yorkers whose parental nest is somewhere in the hinterlands, like Baltimore, or Darien. One mother said that her twenty-four-year-old son had settled in for the long haul. "By the time he is thirty, he wants to buy his own apartment in the Village," she said. "But his idea is that he will still have his clothes and everything at our house, and will come to us to do his laundry."

No one seemed to have greeted her child's departure as a welcome opportunity for renewed marital intimacy, extra storage space, ...