Gwyneth Paltrow is finding the transition away from full-time motherhood to be challenging.

This fall, the actress-turned-entrepreneur saw her youngest child with Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, her ex-husband, head off to college.

In an Instagram Q&A with her followers, Paltrow discussed becoming an empty nester, describing it as very different from the last 20 years of her life.

"I have waves of kind of grief and sadness, she admitted about her children leaving home. And also I am kind of getting back in touch with this part of myself that I haven't felt like since I was in my 20s, before I had kids."

Paltrow and Martin began their family in 2004 with the birth of their daughter, Apple. Paltrow was pregnant at the time of their 2003 wedding in Santa Barbara. They welcomed their son, Moses, in 2006 and divorced in 2016.

"[I have a] little more space and imagination, maybe? [A] little more inner space for like, what I might wanna do that day, and stuff like that. So, it's evolving. It's interesting," she reflected on the experience.

Paltrow has been semi-retired from acting for several years, citing a lack of interest and her role as a mother as reasons for stepping back. At just 26, she won an Academy Award for her role as Viola de Lesseps in "Shakespeare In Love." A decade later, she launched her wellness newsletter Goop, which evolved into the thriving lifestyle brand it is today.

"I think that when you hit the bull's-eye when you're 26 years old and you're a metrics-driven person who, frankly, doesn't love acting that much as it turns out… I sort of felt like, ‘Well, now who am I supposed to be? Like, what am I? What am I driving toward?’" she shared with Bruce Bozzi on his podcast in 2020. "Part of the shine of acting wore off, you know, being in such intense public scrutiny, being a kid who's like living every breakup on every headline, like being criticized for everything you do, say and wear," Paltrow explained. "It's so transitory. You're always all over. It's hard to plant roots. I'm such a homebody."

"If you compound those things with the fact that like, you know, to be totally candid, I had a really rough boss for most of my movie career at Miramax," she said, referencing disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, "You’re like, ‘I don’t know if this is really my calling.' So I'm still trying to parse out what came from what and… how my life changed course."

But Paltrow also wanted to focus on being a mother.

"I really stepped away from acting when Apple was born," Paltrow told People in 2023. "The last time I was in every scene of a movie was when I was pregnant with her," she admitted. "When I had her, it just, everything felt redefined for me, and I thought, 'I'm not sure that I want to do this so much as a career. I definitely don't want to … I'm not going to go away for months on end.'"

Both Apple and Moses are now in college, attending Vanderbilt University and Brown University, respectively. Paltrow's husband, Brad Falchuk, also sent his youngest child to college this fall.