LETTING GO ON COLLEGE MOVE-IN DAY — A MINDSET SHIFT FOR MOMS OF TEENS STEPPING INTO THE EMPTY NEST | EP. 60
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 60.
Hello, my friends. College drop-off is only a few short weeks away. I find myself thinking about the time between now and then like it's this precious gift that I don't want to squander.
And yet there are many days when I don't even get to see my boys because they're busy with work and their friends. It's exactly as it should be, their independence. And honestly, also that I'm not on the top of their social to-do list.
Unfortunately, we have a family vacation planned. And so by the time I release this episode, I'll be in the midst of it. We'll have a lot of time together then.
And so I find myself planning ahead so that we can all make the most of it. If I'm completely honest, there's a part of me that thinks that if I can orchestrate enough fun adventures and dinners while we're away together, that my boys will have a renewed perspective about how cool a mom I am. Even as I say this, I know full well that there's not one thing I can do to control how my boys think about me, but that's not going to stop me from putting my best foot forward.
I know I'm not alone in thinking ahead to that day when we drop our kids off at college. Maybe it's your first, maybe it's your last child. All of us approach this event very differently, honestly, based on a lot of different factors.
But first and foremost, based on our own perspective about what this moment means for us. I read an article online written by a mom who was talking about dropping her oldest off at college. She described feeling happy and excited for her daughter, but also feeling a deep sense of grief that her daughter wouldn't be living at home anymore.
She wrote that when she shared what she was feeling with others, that they weren't supportive and were even surprisingly judgmental. The mom shared that people questioned whether or not she was happy for her daughter, or they contrasted their own experience by telling her they couldn't wait until their own kid went away. In the face of these comments, the mom felt a number of mixed emotions.
First, she'd shared her experience because she just needed someone to listen to her. Sometimes when we're sharing, we don't even really want someone to fix anything, we just want to talk it through. But other times, we honestly share because we're hoping for a little validation that we're not alone in our grief.
The response is this woman got unfortunately created the opposite experience. She felt the opposite of validated. In fact, she felt judged, and that maybe there was something wrong with her that she felt the way that she did.
Often our friends mean well. They want us to feel better, and so if we share that we're sad, they may very well try to help offer thoughts to encourage us to look on the bright side. Thoughts like, but this will be such a great experience for your daughter, or even you should be happy for her.
But as I talked about on the last episode, it's really hard to just swap our thoughts if we're thinking something that brings us emotional pain. And in this woman's case, she really did feel happy for her daughter, but that didn't change the fact that she also felt sadness that a big chapter of her life was ending. You know, as humans, we can experience many emotions, negative and positive emotions all mixed up together.
Feeling sad doesn't negate our feelings of pride and excitement for our kids, but in this case, the mom was questioning why she couldn't just feel happy, as if her feelings of grief were somehow not valid. And look, some moms or parents do celebrate when their kids leave, and that's not necessarily because they had a bad relationship with their children. They could just have the mindset that they're ready for their next chapter, or they've already gotten used to their kids' independence and are frankly looking forward to the time when their child isn't half in and half out the door.
Like when our kids are living their best life at home, doing whatever they want with whoever they want at all hours of the night, and we've got a mess at home and more laundry to deal with. There are a ton of things I'm going to miss about my son when he goes to college, but the laundry is probably not one of them. The point here is that the way we feel as moms in this moment is all about our perspective, the lens through which we view this transition and what we make it mean for us.
There is no right or wrong here. Some might view the transition as a welcome change, no matter how much they love their kids, and others might simply have a harder time letting go of the purpose of being a mom with kids at home. Again, this is all about perspective, and this perspective is 100% responsible for the way we feel.
I want to offer that no matter your perspective in this moment, with weeks to count down before college drop-off, no matter how you feel, you're not alone. If you haven't already listened, you might check out episode 22 of this podcast, where I really dive into the feelings of grief that so many of us experience in this transition. But even though so many women experience grief, I want to offer that you don't need anyone else to validate your emotional experience.
Sure, it's nice when they do, but one thing that's really freed me from a lot of judgment is the understanding that when I feel any emotion, happiness, grief, disappointment, shame, every emotion I have starts with a thought in my head about the circumstances of my life. So all that's happening if I feel grief during this transition is that I'm having a series of thoughts about what college drop-off means for me as a mom. Grief doesn't feel great, and so we may want some relief from the feeling by knowing that what we're experiencing is normal.
But if the emotion is simply coming from the thoughts in your head, why do we need anyone else's permission to view our lives the way that we do? If I feel grief, I may be thinking about how much I loved raising my boys and how quickly it all went. I could be thinking that I'll miss how full my house feels when everyone's home. I'll miss, I already miss, feeling needed.
I miss the times when the boys trusted me with all of their secrets. These are just the sentences in my head right now that are creating the grief I'm experiencing. Maybe you have some others in your head.
My point is, this is my experience. I don't need anyone else to validate it. And based on my perspective, it all makes perfect sense that I feel sad right now.
If there's one thing I wish I could do for every woman, and I really focus on this with my clients, is to help us stop having so much shame around the way that we feel. I may not want to feel grief or anger or resentment or any other strong negative emotion. I might wish that I didn't have to experience this emotional pain.
But when I feel shame about it, all I'm doing is telling myself that I shouldn't be feeling the way that I do. And this does absolutely nothing to relieve us of the pain. In fact, it actually can make the pain worse because on top of the grief or the anger or the resentment, we feel shame.
And shame completely closes our mind to curiosity. And when I ask myself why I feel grief right now, and at this point, it's anticipatory grief. I still have a few weeks before I have to drop my son off.
But when I'm curious about why I feel this, I have nothing but compassion and love for myself. Based on my perspective, of course I feel grief. And this doesn't mean I don't also feel proud and excited and happy for my son.
Our minds have such a deep capacity to hold so many emotions simultaneously. There is no reason to shame ourselves for the emotions that create a bit of pain for us. So I commented on this article that the woman wrote about her grief, that it's not only normal for us to grieve in this transition, but it's also normal for us to judge ourselves and think that we should be handling it better.
It's true. Some women don't experience grief, not because they're inherently stronger, but because they simply have a different perspective. There's no right or wrong.
When you think about all of the reasons you're going to miss your child and what you're losing in this transition, grief is normal. Feeling love and compassion for our feelings rather than shaming ourselves does make the process a little easier. Another reader responded to my comment with a question.
She asked, do you agree parents should refrain from grieving in front of their kid? She commented that she remembered her own college move-in day and she saw moms bawling and embarrassing their kids. She shared that her own mom cried and that it, in her words, ruined her first night at school. Okay, so this comment may open up a whole nother Pandora's box of shame or fear if you're the kind of mom who has a hard time not being emotional when you're sad.
And so let me preface this next part of the discussion with this. None of this is about judgment or doing it wrong. I have to be honest, I'm an emotional person.
My husband encouraged me to practice the wedding vows before our wedding because he was fairly sure I was going to sob my way through them. I'm just a sentimental sort. Luckily, I ended up being so excited and nervous, I made it without a sob.
But I get it, some of us are emotional. But this reader's comment does open up a question worth considering. Because no matter how we're feeling as moms right now, the last thing we would want to do is negatively impact our child as we launch them into college life.
Now, as a coach, it's not my job to tell anyone what to do or how they should act. If you want to cry when you drop your child off, by all means, cry. Crying is a perfectly normal reaction to sadness.
And I will absolutely cry when I drop my baby off to college, guaranteed. But keeping in mind that just like I want the experience of my next few weeks, our vacation, the time I have remaining with my son at home to be as perfect as I can make it, I want to show up as the best version of myself as a mom on drop-off day so I can support my son in what will be one of the biggest, earth-shattering transitions of his life too. I imagine our kids will experience their own crazy mix of positive and negative emotions that they're going through them as they anticipate college drop-off.
They might be feeling relief from having gotten through the college process, maybe enjoying their first summer without any academic stress or SAT prep. Maybe they're excited to launch into this new chapter, to redefine themselves and make new friends. But depending on our kid, they're very likely also experiencing a bit of anxiety and stress.
Living with strangers if this is their first year, what to bring, how to sign up for classes. That first year, it's almost impossible to really envision what their new life will look like. It's like walking off a cliff and not knowing how far the drop is.
Some of our kids might be open books and share all of their excitement and worry with us. And others of our kids might be keeping all of this to themselves, the emotional highs and lows. So it's really impossible to know how much this transition is impacting our kids' emotional state right now.
And whatever they're feeling, it's entirely driven by what they're thinking about this big next step and what it means for them. And it's very likely that in there somewhere is also a bit of grief for what they're saying goodbye to. Having the comfort of knowing mom is just in the other room may even be on the list, even though they may not want to admit it.
But the point is their feelings are being driven by their thoughts, 99% of which, maybe 100% of which really don't have anything to do with us, even if they will miss us. And I was thinking that it's very likely that they have enough comfort in their knowledge that we as moms will always be there for them that makes them able to not worry that they're saying goodbye to the relationship they have with us. We'll always be their mom, whether we're a few feet away, a text, or a phone call away.
The majority of the feelings they're having right now are very likely being driven by their thoughts about everything else other than us. Even consider that we as parents, as their mom, are probably the only thing in their life that isn't changing. Even as I say this, it opens up even in me a bit of a different perspective with my own son and him leaving in a few weeks.
My husband and I, his brother, we are the only thing in my son's life that won't be changing. We are the one constant in his life forever. It's kind of beautiful to think that no matter what challenges my son faces, that there is absolutely nothing that will change how much I love him.
I would imagine you feel very similarly about your own child. So in light of that fact, I can see how our kids might be preoccupied with all of the other ways that their lives are changing, and that it makes perfect sense that almost none of them have anything to do with us. I think back to the reader's comment that the way her mom showed up, her mom sobbing as she dropped her off for her first day of college, that it ruined her first night.
So up until that moment, the young woman's thoughts were likely not at all preoccupied with her mother. Then mom cries uncontrollably, and now the daughter's having thoughts about mom, and it sounds like they weren't good ones. In other words, you're ruining this mom.
Now again, I want to reiterate, this isn't about judgment. As a coach, my job is not to tell my clients what to do or not do, but to help them understand their motivations so that they can decide how they want to show up in the future. So if I were coaching a woman who knew she was prone to being emotional and wanted to work through that before bringing her child to college, as a first step, I would help her drop any shame she feels about her grief and to find compassion for herself in her sadness.
That is the essential first step. The only way to really process these deep emotions is to get curious and understand where our pain is coming from so that we can begin to have compassion for ourselves and eventually let it go. It's almost impossible to truly process emotional pain if we're just resisting it by judging ourselves.
But then once we make peace with where that pain is coming from, again, it could be as simple as, I'm going to miss having this beautiful person filling up space in my home. It makes perfect sense that we need to grieve the parts of our life that we think we have to say goodbye to. And it may even take some time to process that grief.
It may be a companion with us for some time until we get used to our new normal. And it could even rear its head again at the end of every summer as we say goodbye to our kids when they return to college every year. So we first find compassion for our pain.
It's there. We experience this grief as a vibration in our body. And sometimes I even think of it as a feeling I'm going to carry around with me for a while.
One more thing I dump into my purse and carry around with me. But as we do this, as we find compassion for our sadness, we can also start to look at how we show up, how we act or react when we feel certain emotions. When we're not intimate with our mind, we experience our life on autopilot, thinking that our circumstances create our feelings and reacting to those feelings almost against our will.
But when you start to understand that it's not the circumstances that create our feelings, going back to the examples I talked about in the beginning, the circumstance of your child going to college creates grief for some of us and excitement for other of us, or honestly, some different mix of all of the above for all of us. But the bottom line is we all experience a different mix and weight of emotions based on this circumstance. So if it truly was the fact of our child going off to college that caused these feelings, we would all feel the same way, right? If it was the circumstance, we would all feel grief or we would all feel excitement, but we don't all feel the same way.
And this is because we all have different perspectives about the circumstance. We have different thoughts in our minds that interpret the fact of our child going to college. So if you're really not aware of what those thoughts are, it feels like the circumstance causing the grief.
And since we can't change the fact that our kid is going to college, then it seems like there's no way to overcome the grief other than just to try to learn how to get over it or to find new purpose to distract ourselves from the grief. But with awareness around our perspective and with the compassion we bring to our thoughts and emotional experience, it's almost like diagnosing a problem and then having a roadmap to fix the problem. We may not be able to change our perspective right away, but at least we do have the power to eventually change the way we think.
So in the meantime, we feel grief already and move-in day is still a few weeks out. So how do we want to show up for our child with the knowledge that they're also experiencing their own mix of complicated positive and negative emotions? When I think about it for myself, what I know is that I don't want to make me one more thing my son has to worry about. I don't want to make this pivotal moment in his life about me.
Now look, as I mentioned, I'm a crier and my son knows this about me. So when I inevitably shed a few tears as I give him that final hug goodbye, he's going to love me and know this is just how his mom is. To be honest, he might even be weirded out even more if I didn't cry a little bit.
But what I know is I will not break down and tell him how hard this is going to be for me. Now look, I don't control my son's experience. So even if I did cry, even if the circumstance was I was sobbing through college move-in day, my son doesn't have to be impacted by it unless he has thoughts about how it's ruining his experience.
He could simply choose to ignore me. But with all of that said, I don't really want to risk it. And this is just me.
Again, it's not at all my job to tell anyone how they should show up. But knowing I'm prone to getting emotional, I want to plan ahead to hold space for my sadness. Maybe I'll even create a special room in my heart to hold it.
In the same way I'm buying clip-on lamps and mattress pads and mini refrigerators to help make my son's room as cozy as possible, I think I need to create a little room in my heart with cozy pillows and soft music where I can put my grief and know it's a safe, loving space. And outside of that room, there are other emotions. There's pride, excitement, joy, anticipation, worry, and so, so much love.
My heart, your heart, is big enough to hold all of this. And the mix of emotions you're experiencing is uniquely yours based on the way you're thinking about this big moment that seemed to come so much faster than we all thought it would. In so many ways, it seems like our kids don't need us the way they used to.
They're trying so hard to be so fiercely independent. Sometimes we think it would be really nice if they needed us just a little bit more. But I want to offer that our kids might need us more than we think they do, especially in this moment when they take this big leap into a completely unfamiliar new world.
In some ways, it makes me reconnect with that part of being a mother that I love, of being able to be there for my sons, to feel needed. The way I want to show up for my son on college move-in day is to make it all about him. Whether he tells me he needs me or not, whether or not he confides in me about all of the conflicting emotions he may be going through, I'm going to be there to support him.
I'm going to focus all of my energy on him. If he needs help unpacking, I'm in. If he wants to go to lunch, I'm down.
If he needs me to just hug him and leave, I've got him. I'm going to make this day all about him. Am I going to cry a bit? Yes.
But I think focusing on him will probably keep my mind off of my own grief for a bit. That sadness will be there, in that cozy room in my heart, and I'm sure I'll revisit it quite a bit when I come home to our much quieter house and walk by his empty room. We talk about loving our kids unconditionally, and it may be one of the hardest challenges we've faced to love our kids so much that we're willing to let them go, let them not need us as much or seemingly at all anymore.
But as both we as moms and our kids go through this major transition to a new chapter, we can have compassion for all of it, our own grief, even the judgments we have about our own grief, our thinking we must be doing it wrong because we don't seem to be as happy as other parents. We can also have compassion for ourselves that we're not sure what comes next, not sure how to move on or really let go. We can just love ourselves through this experience right now, as if we were the child needing a bit of love and understanding right now.
But in these next fleeting days and weeks leading up to the final hour before I give my son one last hug and walk from his new dorm room, I'm also going to have compassion for my son and all of the feelings he's experiencing. I'm going to hold space for both of us while letting all of this be about him. When I get home, I'm going to have plenty of time to make it all about me, and I have plenty of work to do there.
If you find yourself feeling lost as you face this big transition, you're not alone. And this is exactly what my program Mom 2.0 is here to help you work through. You can find compassion for yourself and process your grief.
You also have the capacity to decide on purpose how you want to show up for your child in this new chapter. And maybe also, for the first time in a very long time, you have the chance to decide how you want to show up for yourself. Until next time, friends.
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.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai - Go Unlimited to remove this message)
