‘From Scratch’ Author Tembi Locke Talks Grief, Growth, & The Next Chapter Of Motherhood

As I listened to Tembi Locke’s new audiobook, Someday, Now, I couldn’t help but think of Fleetwood Mac’s hit 1975 song, “Landslide,” with its familiar refrain: “Time makes you bolder/Even children get older/And I’m getting older, too.”

In 2019, Locke’s first memoir, From Scratch, became a Reese’s Book Club pick and, soon after, a global hit miniseries on Netflix. We all fell in love right along with her as she recounted her life with Saro, the beautiful Sicilian man she met while studying abroad in Italy in college.

But life is full of challenging transitions.

As we discovered in the book and miniseries, while Tembi and Saro’s love for each other seemed transmutable from day one, it would ultimately have to take another form following his death. She became a widow to cancer in her early 40s, a single mother raising their adopted daughter Zoela.

In the summer of 2023, Tembi found herself on the cusp of another one of life’s most difficult evolutions: Zo was leaving home for college. She was caught in a transformative stage of parenting, where you’re left to ask the big, scary question: What does my life look like without the daily cadence of mothering?

When it came time for Zoela to leave for college, Tembi needed a new way to frame this chapter. So, she planned a “college moon” and booked a house by the sea in Sicily for Zo, herself, and her new husband, Robert. Someday, Now, told exclusively as an audio experience, taps into that aching, joyful, sun-drenched, and wildly relatable journey.

We spoke with The New York Times-bestselling author just ahead of its release about why she rejects the idea of “empty” nesting, and why transitions are just as much beginnings as they are endings.

Scary Mommy: After listening to this audiobook, everyone is going to crave the comfort and love rooted in Sicily for you. Do you think everyone has their own version of “Sicily”? Or do we all just need to go there, because I am OK with you telling me that.

Tembi Locke: OK, so here’s the thing — I am always going to cosign on a trip to Sicily. If that is what you would like to do and people would like to do, I say go. But I do think that each one of us has their own Sicily, and it doesn’t have to be far from home. In fact, sometimes it’s very close to home, but it is a place that is restorative. It’s a place where I like to say you can run your fingers along the topography of your life, and really understand who you are in a new way. Understand your past, maybe ask yourself where you’re headed. We all need a place like that, and if you can’t readily identify a place, then I say slow down, think about what that is for you, and then cultivate it.

SM: I love both parts of that because, yes, I will absolutely take your advice and go to Sicily, but it is nice — that idea of having somewhere that feels sacred.

TL: I think we do need sacred spaces in a busy, noisy, complicated, sometimes isolating world, and the world is full of them … It can be, and often is, a park. It’s trees and it’s a lake or a river, but those sacred places are really affirmative of life and very grounding for us.

SM: You’ve said the phrase “empty nesting” never quite fit for you. Why does “re-nesting” feel like a more accurate, and even empowering, way to describe this chapter of life?

TL: First of all, the word ‘empty,’ let’s just start there. It’s a negative. How am I going to define my life by the absence of something? For me, it really felt like I can’t relate to that. My life feels very full. And also, I knew that our home life was shifting and it was changing, but it wasn’t emptying out, where there would just be nothing in the wake.

It felt bleak … pessimistic. It felt a little pejorative, maybe gendered like, “Oh, women with the empty lives and the children are gone, and now you have nothing.”

I was like, ‘I don’t co-sign on that.’

So it was really in talking and thinking about it, and in many various conversations about how do we meet this moment — a big change both in the life of a parent or mother and in the life of a child, but also the whole family. I was thinking about reinvention and reimagining and all of it, which came out of just a lot of conversations that I had with people in my life, and that’s what this is: We are reimagining the nest, and we are pouring into ourselves in a new way as we reimagine our lives.

It felt optimistic; it felt hopeful. It honored the fact that there’s a transition. It suggests that there needs to be some slowing down and maybe intentionality, but it wasn’t a finite ‘it’s empty, it’s done, it’s over.’

SM: True, everybody looks at it as just a subtraction, but there’s addition there that’s happening too.

TL: The truth is, you are not done being a parent. Your relationship’s going to change. That arc of that, it’s not done. Practically speaking, if we just look at the economics of the world, many people stay home and stay close to home, and yet the nest still changes. You have to reimagine the nest even if your child doesn’t go off to college but chooses to stay at home and go to college, or stays home and works. You’re renegotiating your entire dynamic as they begin to individuate.

SM: You also talk about ‘letting go of your child while still holding on,’ and I cannot imagine a mother who can’t relate to that. What’s your advice for balancing that tension?

TL: My first piece of advice is to acknowledge that that is what’s happening. The image that’s coming to my mind is the seesaw. Sometimes you’re more holding on, other times you’re more letting go, but you’re always trying to strike that balance. I think there’s a version of it that’s happening throughout motherhood. If I think about the first time I let my daughter go to nursery school for the whole day, I was a wreck in the parking lot, but I knew she needed to do it, and I knew I needed to do it.

One of the things, on a very practical level, to think about when we talk about holding on and letting go is just to be in dialogue with your child.

I try to frame it as though we’re acknowledging that this thing is happening. We’re not going to bypass it or skip over it or pretend like it’s not a big deal, but to acknowledge it and then to say, ‘What would you like in that situation? What would feel good? I look forward to doing this with you.’

I think it’s that setting the stage for that dialogue around inflection points is really valuable in terms of us being able to titrate how we let go and how we still hold on … I can’t hold onto her early childhood; it’s gone. But what I can hold onto is the values and the connection that we built over all of that time.

SM: The college moon is a big part of this book…

TL: For me, it’s about a moment, just like a honeymoon, that says, ‘Wow, we just did a big thing and our life just changed … You finished high school, and you’re now beginning that first step into your early adulthood. Let’s take a moment and just acknowledge that.’

And it can be a camping trip. You don’t have to go to Sicily, although I’m always here for people who do want to go to Sicily. It can be a weekend where you just fold into each other and be with each other and you get off of what I call the bullet train of activities around graduation, and then the activities to prepare for college. What do we need to buy? Extra-long sheets? How many blankets do we have to bring? All of that. You can get so focused on that that you forget, or you don’t make space for, a sacred pause. And to me, the college moon is a sacred pause.

SM: What would you say to other moms considering something like that?

TL: One, check in with your kid … are they on board for this idea? And if so, what gets them excited about it? Because they’re going to have their own ideas … It’s gauging your child’s interest and then a time, but ultimately you’re going to say, ‘We’re going to do this, but let’s do it a way that feels good for both of us.’

Then I say ask them specifically what they would like from it. I asked my daughter to plan the itinerary, not for the entire trip, but I’m like, ‘Hey, you pick the place. Go tell us what we’re doing for two days. If you’re about to go off to college, you can certainly figure out what we’re going to do for you. You can do that kind of planning.’ And that sense of ownership was really, really powerful.

The third thing I’d say in terms of the planning is to connect it to the second step, which is to leave space. Because what you don’t want to do is just overschedule a time that’s supposed to be just full of discovery and relaxation — or as the Italians say, ‘Dolce far niente,’ the sweetness of doing nothing.

SM: You described this time in the book as a period of reclamation. What do you feel like you reclaimed for yourself?

TL: What I found when I got there was that it was also a time for me to slow down and for me to go, ‘Wow, I did a thing. I raised the human, and she’s about to go away.’ There was that level of slowing down to be with that.

The other thing that I found specific to Sicily, because I have so much history there, is — and I did not know this was going to happen — it became this very full circle loop because I had first come to the island with my daughter’s dad, my first husband Saro. To be there again, he’s not there, but she’s about to go off, it felt like, ‘Oh my gosh, this place and I have history,’ and I could honor various different versions of myself who had come to the island: the newlywed who’d come there, ‘OK, let’s see if we can make family,’ to the widow, to me now in this new marriage and with an adult-ish daughter.

So I think the thing that really surprised me was how life-affirming it was. I think that affirmation is probably what gave me the foundation to think about what was possible, because 20-year-old me could have never imagined the me that was there for the college moon. Couldn’t have imagined that world, and yet there I was.

SM: Oh, that’s really a beautiful way to look at it. There’s such complexity when it comes to resurfaced grief. Do you feel like that looms just as large with every passing milestone, or does it soften over time?

TL: That’s such a great question, Julie, and I think my answer changes. There are times when it still takes my breath away. The depth of it, even now, feels surreal. I’m 13 years after passing, and there are moments, especially milestone moments, where the acuteness of the grief just punches through. What I have learned is I know how to be with it when it punches through in a different way, and that maybe softens the entire experience of it punching through.

Early on when it came on, I didn’t know what to do. I was laid flat and now I know, ‘Oh, OK, it’s here with me. I’m going to be with it.’ I had to take a moment. I’m going to sit down, turn my phone off, look out a window, take some deep breaths, whatever it is I need to do in that moment to care for myself; those are the things that solve the gut punch when it hits.

I don’t believe that time alone heals. I think it’s time and a lot of processing and the work of grief. We can’t just be like, ‘Oh, I’m not going to think about it, and time will just take care of it.’ It’s being with it. And when you are with it over a period of time, I have come to understand that when those moments of acute grief hit me, it is an affirmation of love and an affirmation of the life force that he has, my beloved, and also that I have within me.

It makes me get more like, ‘Well, life, I’m here, so what are we doing?’ It’s so odd that it’s something that can be so bereft, but if you ride that and you allow it to really imprint you and be with it, it can really galvanize you to be more present in the life that you have.

SM: Now you have this beautiful blended family. Something you talk about is this big jumping off point for parents when the kids are gone… What is our dynamic with our partner going to look like? Will we even have things to talk about still?

TL: That is a real and serious question. I was meeting that moment in a new-ish marriage, and Robert and I had never dated without a preteen or teen child in our lives, so we’d never just been the two of us. I knew there was an invitation in this life change for us, but I do feel that it is very common to feel a void. He had been stepdad, boots on the ground, for those years of her life, and suddenly he’s like, ‘I have all this time… what do I do?’ And I’m asking my version of those questions.

One of the things that I would invite couples to do is to create bonding rituals to say, ‘OK, we do have more time,’ we just do. What’s a fun thing that we both would like to do together that bonds us and that we ritualize? So if this is cooking Friday night dinner, we ritualize it. It happens every week, and we do it together. I think that’s very important at this inflection point because invariably during that time you are together, you’ll have a moment to check in with each other about how you’re doing and to plug into the connection, as opposed to just standing in the disconnection or standing in the void of what was.

The other thing is just daily touch points, because life is changing and interestingly enough, empty nesting happens in midlife frequently … a time when there are hormonal changes happening in a family, in a relationship, and so it takes some attending to. It’s not just spontaneously just going to happen.

SM: Looking forward, do you think it’s possible that Someday, Now could find its way to the screen like From Scratch did?

TL: Well, I hold all things possible. Trust me, this is top of mind … I can’t say yay or nay, but I can say anything is possible.

SM: OK, we’re putting it into the universe! Also, I saw on Instagram where you shared a little of the story of your great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Jane and Emma. Is that history something you might explore in a book one day?

TL: Julie, I’m sorry, were you in my car with me this morning when I was driving to work? Are you having coffee with me in the morning? The answer, as you can guess, is yes. I would love to do a family memoir, if you will, that is multigenerational along the matrilineal line. It scares me, but boy, I know that I just feel like, Oh my gosh, I’m driving toward a vast unknown. I don’t know what this is going to be, but on the other side of it, there are some beautiful discoveries that I know will be had along the way. So, I’m up for the journey of it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.