SENIOR YEAR
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 117.
Hello, my friends. Well, I am days away from the start of my baby senior year in high school. And having gone through this once before, I am so aware of how quickly this year is going to fly by.
This time next year, I will already have dropped off my youngest at college and driven home to officially begin life as an empty nester. I feel like I've had one foot in the empty nest already, honestly. You have this evolving feeling that you're letting go in a million micro-moments as your child goes through high school.
Spending more time away from you. Figuring out who they are separate from you. Which sometimes honestly feels very much like them pulling away.
Or at the very least, you start experiencing the feeling of not being as connected or as involved in your teen's life and innermost thoughts as you once were. It's interesting to consider that your role and purpose as a mom is constantly shifting, even while your kids are still at home. You have to figure out how to balance letting go and holding on with each of your kids in different ways.
This balancing act culminates in senior year. A major transitional point for both your child and for you. Some will reference this as being a liminal moment where you're standing in the doorway between two realities.
Life with your child being at home and life with both of you launched into your next chapter. I've already been through this transition once, so as I approached the first day of my babies last year, I thought I'd reflect on the lessons I learned the first time around. Really, the question I want to invite you to ask yourself is, how can I approach this year in a way that serves and supports my child at the highest level, but also in a way that serves and supports you at the highest level? I actually don't think you have to sacrifice one for the other.
In fact, I know from personal experience that having your own back and supporting and loving yourself first actually makes the job of mothering and supporting our kids so much more impactful and meaningful. So in thinking about this, I've come up with three invitations, three recommendations for any mom approaching their child's senior year, or frankly, any major transitional moment. I'm intentionally deciding to create this for myself as well, really asking myself, how do I want to show up this year? Because at the end of the day, I am only in control of how I show up.
I can't control either of my sons. Interestingly, the areas where I feel the most powerless with each of my sons is totally different, because they're different kids and they have different needs. One might accept my support or open up to me in a way the other doesn't.
And they both reject my support in different ways, in different areas of their lives. So figuring out how to show up for each of your kids, how to be the best version of yourself as a mom, it's not a one-size-fits-all paradigm. So here's something really important to consider before I dive in.
Each one of us has 6,000 thoughts a day. And one of the things I talk a lot about in this podcast and that I teach my clients in my coaching program is that these thoughts create your emotional experience, but they also drive how you show up in your life, because it's from your emotions that you take action. You can think about mindset as the sum of all the thoughts that you have about yourself and about your life in any given moment.
And this mindset isn't necessarily fixed. In fact, the thoughts you have throughout any given day or week change based on your circumstances, or more specifically, how you relate to those circumstances. So if your mindset is the sum of your thoughts, and you have 6,000 thoughts a day, and on top of this, the vast majority of these 6,000 daily thoughts are automatic, even subconscious thoughts.
What I mean by that is these are thoughts that you don't even realize you're having because they happen so quickly. But what you actually notice is the feeling that those thoughts create. For example, let's say you feel angry because your teen forgot to take out the trash.
It seems obvious that your anger is created by the fact that the trash hasn't been taken out. But in reality, your anger is being caused by your thought that your teen should have taken out the trash, and they didn't. Maybe you interpret that to mean they're making more work for you.
Or maybe you think that the fact that they didn't take out the trash means that they're irresponsible or lazy or disrespectful. It's not the trash that creates your anger, my friend. It's what you're making the trash mean that makes you angry.
And look, you get to feel angry about this. You even have a right to react to your anger by yelling at your kid to take out the trash. But how many times has the yelling actually worked when it comes to getting your kid to change their behavior? I know from personal experience that the yelling isn't effective and it feels terrible.
But I also get that the anger and the reaction you might have to something that annoys you can feel like a knee-jerk reaction. It happens so quickly. And so this is what I mean when I say the thought is unconscious.
Because you don't even realize that you've had this set of thoughts analyzing the situation as unacceptable. So think about this fact that the majority of our thoughts happen in this knee-jerk way, and then consider how unintentional your emotional experience is if you're not practicing awareness of your thoughts. And then consider the impact on how you show up when you're not intentional with, say, 90% of what you're thinking and feeling.
My friend, even if you can learn to observe 10% more of your thoughts, this can have a profound impact on how you experience your life and how you show up for the most important people in your life. All right, so with that backdrop, how can we become more intentional about our thoughts this year? And what is the real impact of that? So here's my first invitation. Number one, I want to invite you to be present.
Now, it's very likely that in the past you've given yourself this invitation many times. We often want to be present during holidays or on vacation. And think about what happens when you say to yourself, I want to be present.
When you're thinking this, what do you do? You most likely pay a little more attention to your surroundings. You listen a little more intently to what people are saying. You even start appreciating the beauty of that moment a little more.
You open yourself up to it. But this action, this awareness in directing your mind to the present, start with that intention, with the thought, I want to be more present. Now, if you've tried this in the past, you probably also know that this can be easier said than done.
You tell yourself you want to be present. And the next thing you know, you're thinking about something else, entertaining one of the other 6,000 thoughts you're having that day, either annoyed or distracted about something happening right at that moment or pulled into the future or the past. So let's talk about leaving the present moment in our mind for our future.
We do this in so many big and small ways, starting with the simple distractions of just thinking about that to-do list, that person you need to remember to call or your grocery list. Think of this as your monkey mind, that supercomputer of your brain literally jumping through all of these to-do thoughts at the same time. And then other times you start thinking about the future in terms of what will come.
You ruminate on the uncertainty of it all, wonder how things are going to turn out. And look, our brains like certainty and safety, so they scan the future for dangers that we have to avoid. It's no wonder that often when we think about the future, we're left feeling anxious, even possibly dread.
All of this not only takes you out of the present moment, but it actually brings into your present experience fear or sadness about the future that hasn't even happened yet. Your mind can literally rob you of your present moment by getting you stuck in fear of the future. I also want to say though, it is absolutely normal for our brains to do this, to fear the unknown, to look out for danger.
But there is a higher part of your brain that actually has the ability to observe these subconscious thoughts and make sense of them. So this invitation is really a practice, to start to notice the time when your mind wants to take you to those thoughts about the future. You can almost play a game with this, how you'll be sitting with your child at dinner, yet you're distracted by the fact that they're going out later.
Or you're at a school event and you're thinking ahead about what it will feel like at graduation, rather than just being in the moment of the school event. We tend to sink into the feelings created by these thoughts about the future. Sadness that graduation feels like it's around the corner, or hurt that your kid won't be home tomorrow night.
And yet, you're missing the moment right in front of you. This future thinking is robbing you of the ability to be here now. When you're thinking ahead, assuming whatever is to come is going to be painful, you're literally already experiencing the pain of that future that hasn't even happened, that may not happen.
Could you, in those moments when your mind wants to take you to the future and find pain, can you just say to yourself, be present? And that takes me to the second invitation. Number two, be aware of your own expectations and how they set you up for disappointment. Look, we have so many hopes and dreams for our kids, particularly as they go into senior year of high school.
It feels kind of like the capstone year in our role as a parent, guiding our kids to self-actualize and become the humans that we truly hope that they can be. And for better or for worse, it's hard not to interpret our kids' success in the college process, even just the way they tackle the college process, as some measure of our effectiveness as parents as well. We want them to be successful.
We don't want them to be disappointed. We want them to pursue as many opportunities as possible. We want them to work hard and be happy doing it.
We have so many hopes for our kids. And these often also translate into expectations of how we want our kids to show up in their own lives. And look, these expectations aren't necessarily unreasonable.
In fact, with our kids, our expectations are honestly really well-intentioned. Like, of course you love your kids and you want them to be happy and successful in their senior year and as they launch into college. But I wonder if you can find that piece of you that really wants those things because of how you think it will make you feel, seeing those things happen in your child's life.
When our kids are smiling and happy, there is no better feeling. It's also like you get to breathe a sigh of relief that they're okay, that there's nothing to worry about, nothing to fix. We live for those moments as moms.
When they're successful, they're not only happy, but they've achieved something. It's evidence for them and for us that they're moving forward, that they're achieving their goals. For 17 or 18 years, it's been our job to help our kids self-actualize, from taking their first steps, and every step since then leading up to this final year of high school.
We are invested emotionally, spiritually, financially, in every way we can be invested in our kids' success and happiness. So of course we feel happy when we see that happen for them. But let's face it, we also have opinions about what their happiness and success should look like.
We want that for them so badly. We want that for them and for us. And I don't think that there's anything wrong with that.
I want deeply for my kids to be successful and I admit that I have opinions about what I think that should look like. But what I've learned to do is be self-aware about my expectations and how these expectations are not necessarily also my kids' expectations for their life. I'll share a few examples that have come up for me and my clients.
A few years ago, I had expectations about the timeline that I thought was reasonable for my son to be completing his college applications. My son's timeline was different than mine. I've worked with moms who have expectations about how social their kids will be, either more or less, and their kids want to do it differently.
Moms will tell me they wish their child would eat dinner with them more often, but then their teens choose to eat dinner in their room. Some moms want their kids to go to college close to home, but their kids might want to go out of state. There is no right or wrong to these differences in opinion or expectations, but you can clearly see that these differences cause friction.
I know when I had expectations about how my son would tackle his college applications, when I saw he wasn't on top of it like I thought he should have been, I felt anxious. And I nagged, constantly. I worried about it all the time.
I catastrophized. And my friends, none of this got my son to do his college applications any faster. But I also get that it's hard to let go of our expectations.
It feels irresponsible, counter to everything we've always tried to do as a parent. Like we're giving up on our commitment to help our kids be the best version of ourselves. What if they don't apply to college? What if they never learn how to be social? Won't they be lonely? I only have a few months left with my kid at home.
They should want to spend more time with the family. I want them to be closer to home. I get that it's hard to let go of these expectations, and I'm not saying that you have to.
This invitation is about becoming aware of your expectations and taking responsibility for them as yours. Are your expectations right? How do you know? This isn't up to me. You get to enforce whatever expectations you want on your own children.
But here's something to consider. When you think about what you want for your child, how you want them to change or do things differently, ask yourself, are you enforcing this expectation because it's necessary for your team or because it will make you feel better? The answer to this question isn't necessarily clear-cut. It takes some really honest self-reflection.
For example, I was talking to a client the other day, and she was telling me about her daughter and how she was being really disrespectful, and how she felt a responsibility as a parent to teach her child how to talk through her feelings in a way that wasn't so hurtful. I think we'd all agree this is a really worthy goal. Of course, we all want to raise respectful kids who are able to express themselves effectively.
But here's the question. Is your child actually being disrespectful or just not expressing themselves in a way that you want them to? Think about your teen and how you might want them to be doing things differently. And now consider the possibility that they are doing their best right now.
Imagine that however they're showing up is truly your child responding to their own emotional experience in the best way that they can. It's actually so eye-opening to consider this from their perspective. What might your child's words and behavior be telling you that you might not be hearing? All this to say you always get to set boundaries.
You get to decide how you will respond to unacceptable behavior. Sometimes this will involve enforcing consequences. But when it comes to some of our expectations, like my expectation that my son complete his college applications well before the deadlines, what does enforcing this expectation actually look like? Is there even a consequence I can enforce here? Or is the reality that I'm left just nagging my son in hopes that he'll listen to me so that I can let go of my anxiety? Here's the thing.
This is senior year. For many of us, the last year that we have our kids at home. They are in the process of becoming independent adults and before long they will truly be living on their own and living into exactly who they want to be, not who we want them to be.
At the end of the day, the only one that you can control is yourself. So this invitation is to be honest with yourself about your expectations. Because the only reason you feel disappointed, hurt, or frustrated is because the reality of your life isn't matching your expectations.
And this makes perfect sense. You don't have to let go of your hopes and expectations. But you also have the opportunity to consider that there might be a reason your child is making different choices.
How might you show up to the conversation about expectations differently if you also respected that your child might have a different perspective? So here's the third invitation. This invitation is to be in awe of your life exactly as it is right now. For so many of us, as moms, we're so focused on our own expectations, also the responsibility to help our kids meet these expectations, that we miss the beauty of the reality of our lives.
Look, when you have expectations, which we all do, your brain is constantly scanning your world looking for evidence that these expectations have been met. Typically when we see a problem, some unmet expectation, we get angry or frustrated or anxious and focus on trying to fix the situation, encourage our kids to meet the expectation. But when you take responsibility for the fact that you just had a belief that something was supposed to happen a certain way and you were wrong about that, that all that has happened is that the reality of life didn't meet your expectations, you have an opportunity to ask yourself the question, is the reality of my life, although different from what I expected, is it actually so bad? Disappointments happen, our kids make mistakes, and sometimes we don't give them much credit for being resilient.
We don't give them credit for actually trying their best, even if it doesn't look quite good enough to us. We don't take their word for it when they say, mom, I'm okay, or mom, I've got this. Sometimes we can be so focused on how we think things should go that we miss the beauty of our kids.
I worked with one mom who was incredibly worried that her son wasn't social in school, yet she was missing how resilient and strong her son actually was, even though he was experiencing loneliness. Another mom's son didn't get into his dream school and she was so sad for him, she missed seeing how her son picked himself back up, applied to more schools, and got into another school that he was incredibly excited to attend. I was so focused on my timeline for my son's college applications a few years ago that I missed being there for him as he struggled with moving forward.
I didn't appreciate how his procrastination wasn't about him being lazy, but more about him processing the magnitude of his next step. Life isn't always perfectly aligned, maybe it never will be, but all of it is beautiful. The lessons we learn from failure, the sadness and grief we experience because we love so much, the disappointment we feel because we try something really big, take on a meaningful challenge, and often experience a letdown when things don't happen as quickly as we hope.
When you develop this skill of becoming aware of your mind, you put the stories you tell about your life through a powerful lens. The way you think about your life is creating your emotional experience, always. And so when you feel emotions, all of them are 100% valid based on the way you're thinking about your life.
The question is, are you proactively, intentionally deciding how you want to think about your life? Or are you reacting to the subconscious thoughts, one of 6,000 thoughts you have each day? When your emotions are dictated by these subconscious, automatic thoughts, then you experience your life as if your emotions are happening to you. Then you need to focus on changing your life to feel better, rather than being able to take control of your emotional experience intentionally. Think about the impact of our unintentional mind, our reaction to our subconscious thoughts, as we head into our final year or years with our kids at home.
Our brains might focus on fears about the future and bring us sadness in our present moment. We feel frustrated and anxious when things don't go the way that we hope, when our kids don't show up in the way we want them to show up. And we miss the beauty of this liminal moment, this fleeting time with our kids.
Even when my life isn't perfect, even when things aren't exactly as I want them to be, I'm able to allow for the sadness or disappointment I may need to experience in this moment, while also letting go of anxiety about the future, frustration related to my own expectations, and I'm able to truly lean into the awe of the experience of being a mom to two beautiful young men. This year will for sure be bittersweet. There will be incredible highs and powerful lows, the beauty of seeing our kids move towards their next chapter, and the sadness that comes with those micro-goodbyes all throughout this year.
Each last, the last first day of school, the final games, each final celebration. I want to invite you to be open to the experience of your life. So these three invitations, to be present, to take responsibility for your expectations, and to be open to the beauty of your life with your kids, it all sounds so simple, but it can be a challenge to put into practice.
In my life, I have learned a powerful mindset tool that makes the process of taking power back over my emotions so much easier, and this is exactly what I teach in my coaching program Mom 2.0. Consider the power of going into this year embracing the skill set of being present in your life, giving yourself and those you love grace without giving up on your expectations, and truly being in awe of what is. This not only transforms your experience of your life, but empowers you to be the mom and woman you want to be. Think of the power of showing up to your life from a place of peace, grace, and awareness.
In these fleeting moments with our kids at home, think about what a gift you could give both your child and yourself when you always show up at the highest level, always doing your best, and knowing that that's good enough. My friends, this year is not the end. This is not the end of our relationship with our kids.
This isn't the end of our role as a mom. But in life, you are here now. How can you squeeze all of the joy out of this experience of your life right now? Be present in this beautiful moment with your child, my friend.
Until next time.
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.
