WHAT I'VE LEARNED ABOUT LETTING GO AS A MOM OF TEENS - THE LAST GRADUATION DAY | Ep. 156
Welcome back to the Almost Empty Nest Podcast. This episode is all about what I've learned about letting go, going from being a mom of teens to an empty nester, the last graduation day. Welcome to the Almost Empty Nest Podcast with Small Jar Coach.
This show is for moms of teens who are ready to let go with love, release anxiety, and rebuild connection with their teen and themselves as they approach the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins, a master-certified coach, and a fellow mom walking this path right alongside of you. You don't have to navigate this season alone.
Welcome back to the podcast. In this episode, I'm sharing the letter I wish I could send to myself two years ago when my oldest son graduated. In this letter, I reflect back on how much I've learned and grown since that time, but also how much I honor the work that past version of me did to create the experience of life and motherhood I have today.
If you're navigating the rollercoaster of parenting and launching your teen or adult kid, this episode will show you the impact of letting go of control without letting go of connection, and why trusting yourself is the key to creating the relationship with your big kid that you truly want. Whether you're facing graduation day or just bracing for what's next, this episode is for you. Let's dive in.
Hello, my friend. By the time this episode drops, my baby will have just graduated high school. As I'm recording right now, I'm feeling the anticipation of that day.
In truth, I've been feeling the anticipation of it for the whole year. I am so incredibly proud of my son and the man he has become. I am just in awe of it.
And I also have to say that I'm proud of myself too, because I have grown in so many unbelievable ways through this work of self-coaching. I am highly aware of the reality that without this work, there is so much beauty about my life and this journey of motherhood that I would have missed. And looking back on this past year, all I feel is gratitude.
Because despite the ups and downs and the stress of the college process and the sadness of saying goodbye to this chapter of motherhood, I am embracing the beauty of my life in a way that I never knew was possible. And this is such a gift. So as I think ahead to who I plan to be on graduation day, and as I step into the empty nest as a mom with both sons in college, I thought I would share with you a letter that I wish I could send to the version of me who watched her oldest graduate high school two years ago.
That version of me had already grown so much. She had learned, in a bit of a trial by fire, that holding on too tight was only hurting her relationship with her son. She had learned how to let go of control because she had to.
It was the only hope she had to salvage a relationship with her son that was still very tender and tenuous. She was willing to believe and hope fiercely that her relationship with her son would get better over time. But she wasn't sure what that was going to look like.
It felt like she was standing on the edge of a great unknown. She was feeling the ache of lasts and an underlying feeling of grief about how much she felt she was saying goodbye to. Today, I want to reflect back on that version of myself and thank her.
She was willing to question everything she thought she knew about being a good mom. She chose growth in the face of heartbreak. She learned to let go when everything in her wanted to hold on tighter.
And she kept showing up, not perfectly by any means, but with so much courage and love. I see her now and I want to tell her every moment of self-reflection, every tear she shed on those long walks, every time she stopped to decide how to move forward with intention, every single minute of it mattered. Because it made me who I am today, the mom I want to be.
So join me as I take a journey back in time as I write a letter to my past self. Dear me, I am you two years from now and I'm writing to let you know that the work you have done to be the best version of yourself has had ripple effects that I am reaping the benefits of now and I have no doubt will only compound as time goes on. As I think about where you are two years ago, you're about to walk on stage and hand your oldest son his high school diploma and boy have the past four years for you been a journey.
You and your son have had to grow up a lot over the past year. You faced a challenge you never saw coming and it brought you to your knees. I think back to those long walks you took, giving yourself space to cry and grieve.
You felt so lost and disconnected from your beautiful son. On the one hand, you felt blindsided by what was going on with him. But on the other, you could also see all of the ways that you had messed up, the ways you were to blame for what happened.
And you couldn't take it back. You couldn't turn back time. All you could do was apologize and hope that things would get better.
My friend, you are slowly emerging from such a dark and painful season as a mom, but I want to tell you, it will get so much better. It doesn't happen overnight. But because you learned from your mistakes and decided to show up from a place of love and not control, you opened the door to an even stronger relationship with your son.
You made it possible for me to become a mom who is so grounded and confident in who she wants to be for her boys that no matter what comes, I trust myself to know what to do. That first time, going through junior and senior year, there was so much I didn't know, so much I wasn't prepared to handle. Could I trust my son to figure out his life? What am I responsible for? How can I let go of these things that really matter and trust that everything will be okay? That word trust is so tricky because how do you trust? At times it feels like faith, like you just have to be willing to believe in something even when there's no real evidence to suggest that your belief is based on anything other than hope or delusion.
I remember feeling this way during my oldest senior year. I wanted to trust him, but I also felt so responsible to keep him from making really big mistakes. Isn't that what a good mom does? She keeps her kids from facing catastrophic failure, even deep disappointment.
Why stand by and let your kids go off the rails when you can do something? What I understand so clearly now is that I was scared. Not just scared of standing by and letting the boys make mistakes, but scared of the implications of those mistakes. What happens if he ends up in a place he seriously regrets? What happens if he looks back and thinks that I should have prevented this disaster, that it was my fault, that I let him down? I was scared of his pain, but I was also scared of mine.
Because what happens when your kids are in pain? It feels inevitable that you're going to hurt too. In fact, it's so interesting that we'll go to such great lengths to avoid pain when in reality, life is going to bring pain. That's just the truth.
You love people deeply, and then you lose them. Love, grief, joy, and pain. It is literally built into the fabric of human existence, and yet we are petrified when we think about it ahead of time.
God, I think sometimes if I had had a crystal ball and seen what was coming for us our oldest sophomore year in high school, I know for sure I would have tried to warn him. I know that's what I've told myself so many times, that I'd failed to warn my boys about the signs of an unhealthy relationship. I didn't teach them about red flags, and so they barreled into relationships with their hearts open and vulnerable, and I was at fault for letting their hearts get torn open.
But also, the truth is, if I had known, would things actually have been any different? How can I ever know? For sure what would have happened is that I would have latched onto the vision of that worst-case scenario, and it would have been all-consuming for me. I would have been petrified. One more boogeyman to fear.
Our brains are already so good at catastrophizing, and yet all of this worry doesn't do us any good other than creating pain for us right now. Now I understand that trust is a practice. You learn to trust when you let your child face a natural consequence and don't rush in to fix it.
And then you suddenly see how they actually handled the situation in a way that makes you proud. Not necessarily the way you would do it, but in the way they needed to learn to get through it. You build self-trust when you let go of the need to control out of fear, and instead choose to focus on where you do have control.
You build trust when you're able to be present in your life, when you're able to see your beautiful kids for who they are. Not perfect, definitely messy, these baby adults, almost like Bambi trying to stand up on their wobbly legs. They want so much to be independent.
And when you stop needing to swoop in to be sure they don't trip and fall, you actually get to appreciate the perfection of this wobbly stage, because their legs seem to get stronger with every step. And before you know it, they're running. When you're consumed by fear, you miss the beauty of this transformation.
You spend so much time making their moods and their choices about you, rather than seeing how little of this is actually about you at all. For me, I think that's the grief I'm feeling now as our baby graduates. I call him a baby, but would you believe he's 6'2 and huge? I have to jump up to hug him.
For so long, your life revolves around your kids. In fact, your life is your kids. Motherhood defines how you spend your time.
Not only what you do, but the friends you spend time with. So much of it is around school and activities, and this role is the epitome of purpose. The work of motherhood is important and all-consuming, and we've thrown our hearts into it.
It's always been this way, but these years of raising teens are challenging on a whole new level. This question of how best to support your kids is literally a daily, if not an hourly, question on our minds. On Mother's Day, I saw a post showing Tom Cruise and Jerry Maguire say it best.
I am out here for you. You don't know what it's like to be me out here for you. It is an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about, okay? Help me help you.
Help me help you. This is literally what raising a teen feels like. And yet, what I think we miss is that at some point, it truly isn't our job to help.
At least not in the way I think we often think it is. We don't even realize that we think it's our job to keep them from struggling. We think we're responsible for making our kids happy.
You know, I think back to those early days of having a baby or a toddler, and it was literally our job to answer our kids' every need, every beck and call. And of course we did it. Not only because they needed our help with just about everything, but also, when you think about it, it made our lives easier to be sure they were happy.
And if we're really honest with ourselves, we still operate this way. When our kids are thriving and happy, we get to feel the joy of them. And when they're not, cue pain and discomfort.
It can feel like we're on a roller coaster of emotions tied to our kids' happiness and their success. It can feel like this is an inevitable part of motherhood. But my friend, you learn the hard way that when your big kid is really struggling, there is often very little, if anything, you can do to take away their pain.
If we're lucky, they'll come to us for help and support when they need us, but there are going to be times when they don't. And we're going to be left standing on the sidelines, watching what feels like the train going off the tracks, and we're going to be helpless to do anything to stop it. This is so incredibly painful.
And yet what you learned through this trial by fire is that the only thing that you have the power to control is how you show up to each and every moment of your life. That's it. No matter what's going on with the boys, no matter how they treat you or what they're struggling with, the hard truth is you can give them advice, you can offer to help, but none of that will actually guarantee they'll listen or that it will change anything.
This is one of the hardest truths of motherhood, that no matter how much you love your kids, you can't control their happiness or their success. That even your very best intentions can be met with silence or ambivalence or fighting back and resistance. Over the past year, you were forced to accept this truth, and instead of fighting it and escalating the power struggle, you made an intentional decision to love your son for exactly who he needed to be.
That doesn't mean you let him walk all over you. In fact, you were very clear with your boundaries. But because you were intentional about who you wanted to be for your son, you opened the door to him finding his way back to you.
And he did. Even as you look ahead to his graduation, I know you were nervous about asking him if you could present his diploma. It felt like it was too much about you after everything that you two had been through.
You didn't want to overstep. Although you've made progress in your relationship with him over the past few months, I know you're still not sure where you stand with him. I'm proud of you for asking his permission and deciding ahead of time to be willing to hit... I'm proud of you for asking his permission and deciding ahead of time to be willing to accept his no gracefully.
There was a time when you would have taken all of this personally, but you know that this is not about you this graduation day, and you are willing to give your son the gift of not making it about you. But he's said yes, so trust it. It's so tempting to second-guess this answer out of insecurity after everything, but take his yes at face value.
You are opening up a door to a new relationship with your now adult son. In fact, you're opening up this door to both of your sons. There will come a day when your oldest will say to you, Mom, we don't talk anymore.
And you will tell him with absolute delight that you were always available to talk. And so that also means he's going to call you at 10 p.m. at night from college when you've already been asleep for an hour, but you're going to pretend to be awake just so you can hear his voice. Would you believe he's going to tell you that he misses you? When he comes home from college, he's going to tell you he's glad to be home.
He's going to make time for you in ways that you could never have imagined given what you've been through over the past year. What you've been through is just a season, and if you're willing to show up with intention and love even in these hard seasons, you're laying the groundwork for connection that is reciprocal, that comes back to you. You can't force it, but you can invite it.
You can keep the door open, and all of the work that you've put into cultivating this relationship with your son over the past year has made all of this possible for me now. These lessons have made all the difference in how I've approached junior and senior year with our youngest over the past two years. I've always been driven to help the boys be the best they can be.
And for my oldest, that often looked like setting really high expectations and feeling responsible to help him think three steps ahead. In retrospect, I can see how that kind of pressure could have made it easy for him to pull away and see me as the enemy. I'd been so afraid to let go that first time around, but even with the youngest, I've been able to thread the needle between believing in his high potential and being willing to do anything I could to support it, while also being very clear to set boundaries with myself about how much to push and what I needed to let go.
The difference has been extraordinary. Not only have I felt like a valued partner to my youngest as he's gone through a stressful junior and senior year, but I've felt the absolute pride and joy of seeing how much he is rising to his own potential, not because I'm pushing him, but because he's driving himself, not always in the way I think he should, but in the way that's true for him. Don't get me wrong, I still want to save these beautiful young men from pain, but I also realize that shielding them from discomfort isn't the same as loving them.
As much as we often tell ourselves it is, over the past year, especially in the midst of a very challenging and disappointing college process, I've seen my urge to step in and try to fix it again and again. But instead of doing that, I've been able to take a breath and remind myself my job is just to love my son. Full stop.
I am here to support him in whatever he needs, but I let him take the lead on telling me what that is. And more often than not, there's very little I can do. I actually have to sit with my own discomfort, because I understand that this is my responsibility and not his to fix.
I've freed him of the responsibility to have to worry about how I'm handling all of this. I see now what a gift that is. It's also been a gift to know how strong and resilient I am in the face of processing my own pain.
I know I am 100% able to care for my own emotional well-being. And what that means for my boys is that I am able to be 100% present in their lives, for them. I give them a mom who sees them clearly, without projecting my own fears onto their experience or their future.
I give them a mom who believes in what's possible for them, even when they fall down or let themselves down. I give them the safety of knowing that they don't have to perform or achieve or behave a certain way ever to earn my love or to protect me from my emotions or reactions. They don't have to call every day or make all the right decisions or follow a path that makes sense to me.
They are free to be who they are. And I am free to love them for exactly who they are, as they are. That is the gift of doing this work.
It's a miracle of letting go, not of your kids, but of the story that their success or happiness is our job to create. I am so anchored in my own sense of peace and self-worth, and because I am certain of this truth in my own capacity to care for myself, I am also confident in my ability to be a safe place for the boys to land, capable of handling whatever comes, even if they can't. And what I am witnessing now is that the boys see this in me.
Even if they don't always say it, I know they feel it. They feel my unconditional love and support. They know they're safe to grow at their own speed.
And maybe most importantly, they know they are deeply, fiercely loved for exactly who they are. My friend, I know you're looking ahead to walking up on that stage, just as I am looking ahead to that moment right now in a few weeks. I have tears in my eyes just thinking about that moment, and not because I'm scared or sad, but simply because I am in awe of the beauty of my life, of the gift of having been a steward of these beautiful lives for what feels like way too short a time.
My dear self, that version of me two years younger, I honor you for your strength and grace, and simply your willingness to grow every moment. You chose to love unconditionally, even when that love wasn't returned back to you in the way that you'd hoped. You chose to examine your thoughts instead of letting them run your life.
You did the hard work, not to just get through that time, but to become the kind of mom you wanted to be. And because of that courage and hard work, because of that intention, you gave me the life I have now. You gave me the kind of connection I once thought I had lost for good, not because you fought to hold on tighter, but because you had the wisdom to let go.
I am living in the beauty you created, even when you weren't sure it was possible. You were already becoming the version of us that I now get to be, and I am so incredibly grateful to you. As I walk on stage to hug our little old man, standing six feet two, and give him his diploma, I will be honoring everything you have given to me by being present in that moment.
Thank you for this gift, with love, me. Before I end this episode, I want to take a moment to speak directly to you, the mom listening right now. I imagine you standing at the edge of your own transition, maybe looking ahead to a high school graduation or a college graduation, maybe watching your child pull away or just feeling the pain of anxiety and frustration and uncertainty that seems to be a constant in this stage of motherhood.
You might be asking yourself, am I doing this right? How do I let go without letting go of my kid or without everything falling apart? If that's you, I want you to know I see you, and you are so not alone. The experience of raising our kids, especially through the teen and young adult years, is hard work. It's emotional and exhausting, and no one else truly sees what it's like to be you.
No one else understands the mental gymnastics you do every single day to balance love and boundaries, to show up without losing your mind, how hard it is to stay close and give your kids space. But I see you, and I've been you, and I want to offer you something that I wish someone else had known to say to me seven or eight years ago. You have so much more power than you think you do.
Not the kind of power that controls outcomes or guarantees everything's going to be okay all the time, but the power to decide how to show up in your life. How to show up for your kids, but also how to show up for yourself. The power to care for your own emotional well-being so fully that your peace isn't at the mercy of your kids' moods, or their choices, or their stage of growth.
This isn't just about doing your best as a mom. It's about doing it with intention. It's about feeling connected even when your teen pulls away or seems totally disinterested.
It's about loving your kid unconditionally even when you don't love their attitude, or their actions, or their choices. It's about your ability to choose how you want to show up rather than blindly reacting. Choosing not to go down the spiral of anxiety and worst-case scenarios.
This is about refusing to let go of yourself in the process of showing up for your family. If this time of motherhood has you feeling lost, grieving, anxious, unraveling, you're not failing, but you are in it, and you don't have to navigate it alone. If you'd like to learn how to feel more confident and clear and more connected to both your teen and yourself, I'd love to help.
This is exactly the work I do with my clients. Helping moms of teens and empty nesters stop spiraling in anxiety and start trusting yourself so that you can show up as the mom you truly want to be. This work transforms relationships, not only with your kids, but even more importantly, the relationship you have with yourself.
If you'd like to explore what that looks like, just click the link in the show notes to learn more and schedule a call with me. My friend, this work never ends. There will always be moments in life that challenge us.
Life will continue to life, but every challenge, every beautiful opportunity offers you an invitation to be that best version of yourself. To care for your emotions without making them someone else's fault or responsibility. To choose trust, not because you know how things will turn out, but because you know who you are and who you are consciously deciding to become.
This is power, my friend, and you already have this potential inside of you. I believe in it, and I am here when you're ready to realize it. So here I am, by the time this podcast comes out, the mom of two graduated high schoolers, an official empty nester, and I am already certain that this journey doesn't end with letting go.
It is only the beginning. In this transition, we're not losing our purpose. We're given an opportunity to find it again.
And when you choose to take this invitation and accept the possibility of your power to become who you really want to be, your future self, she won't just be proud. She will be in awe of what you're creating for her. Until next time, my friend.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
