☕ Feel guilty for actually enjoying the quiet now that my kids have left for college

Both my kids left for college this year, one in August and the other just last month, and the house has genuinely gone from constant noise and activity to an almost startling quiet that I expected to find genuinely difficult to adjust to, the way most people describe this specific transition happening to them once their kids actually leave home. Instead, and this is the part that genuinely surprises and honestly unsettles me a little, I have actually found myself enjoying it. Quiet mornings with my coffee, being able to watch whatever I actually want on television without any specific negotiation, having real, uninterrupted time to read again properly for the first time in years, small things that I did not realize I had genuinely missed until they suddenly became available to me again after so long. Mentioned this to a friend whose kids left home a couple of years earlier than mine did, and she admitted feeling something fairly similar herself at the time, though she said it took her considerably longer than it has taken me to actually feel okay admitting that specific feeling out loud to anyone, even to close friends, worried it made her sound like a genuinely bad or uncaring mother somehow. I do love my kids deeply and genuinely miss them in real, specific ways, our regular phone calls, small family routines we used to have together, but the actual quiet itself has been a real, unexpected and honestly quite welcome relief that I did not fully anticipate feeling this strongly beforehand. My own mother, when I mentioned this feeling to her recently, said she felt exactly the same specific way after I left home myself decades ago, and that admitting it out loud back then would have felt genuinely unthinkable to her at that particular time in her own life. Has anyone else felt this specific mix of missing their kids while also genuinely enjoying the quiet more than expected, and did that particular guilt about actually enjoying it eventually fade on its own with enough time?

Felt exactly this after my own daughter left for university two years back, genuinely alarmed at how quickly I adjusted to the quiet mornings and stopped feeling guilty about it fairly fast once my own mother admitted feeling the same thing after I left home myself decades earlier. Missing them and enjoying the space are apparently allowed to sit next to each other without cancelling either one out.