UNCONDITIONAL CONNECTION WITH YOUR TEEN
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional roller coaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 132.
Hello, my friend. I watched this terrible movie the other day. It's literally called My Old Ass.
Maybe I just don't like it because of the title. Because here I am talking about it. The movie's about a 17-year-old girl who's headed off to college, and she's spending her last month at home before, I presume, the fall semester begins.
I don't want to give too much away in case after this unintentional review you're dying to watch it. But basically, after doing mushrooms with her friends by the lake one night, she has this vision of herself at 39. And let me just say, especially now that I'm over a decade older than 39, that 39 does not warrant being called an old ass.
And I don't think we deserve to be called old asses at 50 or 60 either, by the way. But I guess it might be true that at 17, 39 did seem kind of old. Anyway, one of the redeeming qualities of the movie is that both the 17-year-old and the 39-year-old versions of this young woman learn something from the other.
The 17-year-old is reminded to be in the moment and appreciate her family a bit more before she leaves home. And then you find out that the 39-year-old version of this young woman isn't happy. You don't find out until the end why that's the case, but the 39-year-old actually learns from the 17-year-old that she needs to learn how to embrace life in a way that she'd been missing as life got hard for her along the way.
We often think that we're older and wiser, and that we have so much to teach our kids, so much life experience that we need to pass down to them. But can we sometimes miss the wisdom that our kids might have that we might be missing? Even though on one level, the movie was kind of terrible, believe it or not, I found myself crying throughout the entire second half of the movie. I don't know if it was because I was watching it with my older son.
There were these great liners about how 17-year-olds are really selfish. And then, of course, these cheesy moments when the 17-year-old realized she wanted to embrace the time she had left with her family. I kept looking over at my son and nudging him, looking for him to agree that the movie was making these profound statements about the teen years and parenting.
To be honest, he wasn't really as engaged in the movie as I was. I realized there was a part of me as I was watching that wanted to share these little epiphanies with him. I wanted him to agree that 17-year-olds are selfish.
Haha, right? Or that, of course, teenagers should want to appreciate their families. I could sense myself feeling a twinge of disappointment that he wasn't having the same kind of moment with the movie that I was. There's another part of this movie that I really appreciated, and maybe this movie should have been marketed more heavily to the emptiness set.
It's better than I'm giving it credit for, apparently. But the movie did a lovely job of portraying the conflict we moms feel as we allow our teens to be who we are, while also feeling sad that the transition involves them growing up and growing apart from us. There was a scene where the whole family had baked a cake for this young woman for her birthday, and she just didn't bother to show up or even text her mother back.
Would you believe that this mom never once gave her daughter a guilt trip about that? She did tell her daughter that the family had baked her a cake, but the mom didn't make her daughter's choice about her or her not wanting to spend time with the family. It takes pretty powerful intention to hold space for that sadness and disappointment, while also embracing the beauty of who your child is, even if that takes them away from you or if there are parts about how they live their life that you don't fully embrace. This is the lesson from the movie that hit home most to me, that we moms are caught in this push and pull of wanting to love and embrace our child's growth and transition, really wanting them to feel empowered to go out and live their life and do big things, but also left holding on, feeling terrified that we're losing something precious, something that we may never get back in the same way.
The transition to the empty nest looks different for each of us. If you've had a really close relationship with your child, you might experience the transition as truly the loss of day-to-day closeness. Others of us feel loss because we perceive that our child is choosing to pull away.
It's less about them transitioning to college and more the feeling of being pushed away. Some of us fear that our kids aren't ready for the world and we're caught feeling like we're still responsible to help them, and yet we also realize that we don't have the power to fix or change their biggest challenges. In all these ways and more, we're caught between holding on and letting go, and the result for us is anxiety, frustration, sadness, even grief.
I want to say first that all of these feelings are so valid. On the one hand, we have to honor the truth of how we feel at this transition and take care of ourselves through it. For many of us, motherhood has given us the opportunity to feel something so meaningful and profound in our life, that as our kids grow up and we feel as if we have to let this period of our life go, the grief of that loss can feel big.
While we intellectually know that our kids have to move on with their lives and that it's a natural part of growing up, you can truly be left feeling like you're not sure how to move on. As my boys have grown up, I've realized how much of myself I've put into raising them, investing so much of my emotional and intellectual energy in caring for them. If I'm honest, this focus has at times been at the expense of other things in my life.
And don't get me wrong, I would make that choice again and again. My boys are everything to me. But I can see how over the past five or six years, I've tended to stay closer to home, to not seek out connections with other people.
I've chosen to not make plans just in case one of the boys is home and available for dinner, to also not want to go out because the boys are going out and I want to be around if something happens, or maybe not to go out because I don't want them to come back to the house and have a party. So many valid reasons, but also excuses. It's felt easier in many ways to keep focusing on my boys just in case.
It hasn't required any additional effort on my part to do this. But as our kids increasingly leave the nest, we can be left feeling like, is this all that's left for me? There's me at home doing housework, watching TV. Am I the only one who's felt this? Even as our kids have grown up, during the time when they're still in high school, the worry about their list of things to do can feel really important, purposeful even.
My baby's a senior and I am very aware of what tests he has or what college application deadlines he's coming up against. You can spend a lot of your emotional energy holding space for your kid's life. And I think that's true whether they really need us to do that or not.
It could be a habit on our part or a function of us still holding on to the purpose of motherhood, wanting to feel needed. There have been times with my boys when I've offered my help or waited around to be needed and it's like I've known even ahead of time that they wouldn't want or need my help. I've been willing to be ready anyway, sometimes standing by really without being needed, but feeling purposeful even in the waiting.
But there have been those miraculous times when they really have needed me. As young men, when they've asked me for help in those moments, it's like clear the decks, make way for mom. There's nothing else that's more important to me in that moment.
There was one time last year, right before my youngest son got his driver's license, he'd taken an Uber home and he came bursting into my office and he said to me, mom, I left my cell phone in the Uber. I don't know if you've ever lost anything in an Uber and tried to get a hold of customer service, but it's literally not a thing you can do. It's like there's no human being attached to Uber.
We tried calling the cell, but the Uber driver didn't answer. The Uber app only had an automated form to fill out. It was very clear that we weren't going to get that phone back anytime soon.
As if that's not bad enough, my son uses his phone to manage his insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor for his type 1 diabetes. So what was already a minor inconvenience escalated into a real problem. But then we realized that the Find My iPhone app was still active on his phone.
So we both looked at each other and without speaking, we rushed out to the car to track down the Uber driver. We literally went on a wild goose chase on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey. So we're cruising on the highway and the whole time I'm telling my son, please don't drive like me when you get your license.
You have to be 50 years old to drive this way. But as we're following this guy, somehow we realized that he'd gotten off in an exit just as we're passing that same exit. So 10 miles later, we get off at the next exit and double back.
At that point, it looked like the Uber had completed another stop and was starting to head back north back towards our house. So the guy ended up parking in a Costco. So we were literally driving around for over 30 minutes only to eventually end up in a Costco that's five miles from our house.
But we made it. My son identified the Uber and he walked up to tap on the window and luckily the driver didn't freak out. He gave my son his phone back.
Mission accomplished. But when I tell you, I felt like a million bucks in that moment. Not only did my son's relief and gratitude make the craziness of the adventure worth it, but somehow I had captured a precious 30 minutes of being there for my son just because I was ready.
What amount of waiting around to be needed wouldn't you invest just to have that payoff? As ridiculous as that story is, that is motherhood. It's waiting in the wings for those moments when we're needed and when we are able to help. And on top of that, for a moment, they're grateful.
It's everything. It's also a taste of the beauty of what we've had for so long as our kids have grown up. The privilege of feeling needed, of meeting someone else's need, who you love.
There is no greater mission in life. But those moments now feel fleeting. Fewer and farther between.
So how can you fill this void? How do you repair this loss we feel? Letting go of this purpose, of the feeling of being needed. I think it can be helpful to recognize that our kids' actions are entirely about them. It's why I laugh so hard in the movie when the older version of this young woman said 17-year-olds are inherently selfish.
And I recognize, my son didn't laugh. And maybe it's not selfish. They're just self-focused.
They're so focused on figuring out and filling their own needs. They're not spending any energy worried about our needs. I mean, we're the adults, right? Shouldn't we have this life stuff figured out by now? Think about the transition that our kids are facing in their lives and how scary that could be for them.
In truth, it's probably been quite some time since we've stepped out of our comfort zones and reinvented ourselves in the same way. That move to college, to whatever comes next for our kids. Walking away from everything that's comfortable and safe.
This is a huge transition for them. And for them, like us, this transition and the evolution towards what comes next isn't just about the summer before they go to college. More often than not, our kids are being told even before they get to high school that they've got to ramp things up to be ready for college.
That they have to focus on their grades and get a part-time job. And meanwhile, they have no context for what college or life beyond high school is going to look like beyond what they see in the Having to meet a bunch of new people. Step away from the comfort of home.
That could sound like heaven or hell depending on our kids' perspective. But no matter what, you can't deny that it's scary, whether they want to open up to us about that or not. I imagine that it's rare that an 18-year-old heads off to college feeling absolutely confident in this next stage of their life.
I've heard it's common even for our kids to soil the nest before they leave home. Maybe it's because they need to forcibly pull away a bit to make that moment of goodbye a little bit easier for them. Again, all of our kids are different.
But all this to say, it makes sense that our kids are focused on themselves at this point in their lives. I've been thinking recently about this concept of unconditional love and how we tend to believe wholeheartedly that we love our kids unconditionally. When you really think about what that means, we're telling ourselves we love our kids no matter what they do, no matter who they are or how they act, that there's nothing they can do to negate our feelings of love for them.
It's really a beautiful concept. So we feel unconditional love for them. But I think sometimes what does feel conditional is our ability to feel loved by them, as if there's something that they can do or not do to take away our feeling, that feeling of being loved.
It's kind of interesting when you think about it. What we're really saying is that there are a particular set of behaviors that we want from our child in order for us to feel their love. Sometimes our kids can be really dismissive.
It's easy to feel hurt and disconnected. We let our connection with our kids be conditional, even though we tell ourselves our love for them is unconditional. Maybe if we were forced to admit it, we would probably say, no, my kid does in fact love me, even if they don't show it all the time.
But I want to invite you to consider something. If you can love someone unconditionally, why can't you also feel connected to that person unconditionally? I talked before about how our kids at this young adult stage of life can be selfish. They focus on themselves.
It's like we can intellectually know that their behavior is developmentally appropriate, and yet our brains still want to make it a problem, to tell us that what's happening shouldn't be happening. In those moments, I wonder if we could remind ourselves that our kids' behavior truly has nothing to do with us. Their actions, the way they show up, it is entirely about them and their perspective and experience.
And if we could really embrace that, is it possible for us to feel a little bit of empathy for them about what they're going through at this stage of their life? They are entering uncharted territory, and it's possible that they're spending a lot of their mental and emotional energy thinking about who they are and who they want to be, even if they're not sharing all of that with us right now. What we know is true is that we love these young people more than anything in the world. And if what this person who you love needs right now is a little bit of space, a little bit of flexibility to figure out who they are, I wonder if that might be a gift that we can decide to give them.
I wonder if we could let our kids off the hook for having to prove their love to us, having to prove and even validate our need for connection, just so that we can feel these emotions that we want to feel, love and connection. Many of us spend a good portion of these teen years standing by, ready to be needed. Our kids get busy with life.
They're locked in their room doing homework or out with friends, out at work or practice. Sometimes we can find ourselves standing on the sidelines, not making plans, not wanting to take on too many outside responsibilities, just so we can be there if they need us. Notice how we can hold on to that purpose, even when our kids don't really need us.
Consider that you actually have the ability to create the feeling of purpose, even when your kids don't need you all the time. You also have the ability to decide to feel connected, decide to love your kids unconditionally, and all of this is a decision you can make. No matter what your teen does, no matter how far away they go or how few times they call, you can decide to create feelings of love and connection for them.
You have in your capacity the ability to love this human being so much that you can give them the gift of being exactly who they are without having to prove that you still have purpose as a mom. You have the ability to create that all by yourself. But here's something really interesting that's worth exploring the older your kids get.
If you can create purpose, connection, and joy no matter what your kids do, then you can create that in all areas of your life. Your emotional experience does not have to be dependent on your circumstances. Or maybe said another way, you get to decide what brings you joy and love, what creates purpose and connection for you.
In fact, what creates purpose and connection for me may be very different than what creates these feelings for you, because we both have different preferences, different things we like to do, and different needs. For so long, you have made the decision that your kids are the source of love, connection, and purpose for you. That doesn't have to change, although the time you spend with your kids will likely look different as time goes on.
But then what's left? You very likely have room in your life for more. A new purpose, new avenues for connection, more opportunities for joy. What's holding you back from considering the possibilities? For me, motherhood has been such a privilege to have the opportunity to feel this incredible depth of purpose and love and connection.
It's expanded my ability to feel, to have love in my life. I don't think that's something we ever have to let go. There have definitely been some aspects of motherhoods that I have had to let go as my boys have grown up.
I've had to let go of being right, of thinking I know what's best all the time for my boys, because what's very clear is that they have their own opinions about what's best for them. I've also had to let go of some of my expectations about how things would turn out, and even what our day-to-day relationship would look like. In fact, over the course of motherhood, I feel like we experience a million micro-deaths as we let go of past versions of ourselves, past versions of our kids.
This process of letting go has been continuous. Although there have been so many things I've had to let go, and I do at times grieve the loss of time and those past versions of us, I also actively decide that I will never let my boys go. They will be my sons forever.
I will certainly never let go of my love for them, and I also don't have to let go of the deep purpose I feel as a mom. No matter how far away they go, I will always be here if and when they need me, ready to chase down that next Uber driver at any time of the day or night. But I've also come to realize that I don't have to sit around waiting to be needed anymore.
When my boys need me, I know they'll know how to find me. Those things that keep us holding on when it's time to let go, those are the things that are often holding us back from creating the life that we want. Sometimes it also means we're holding our kids back too.
On December 30th, I'll be hosting a free masterclass called Letting Go So Your Teen Can Fly. In this class, I'll explore the common mindset traps that keep us feeling like we need to hold on. These traps keep us stuck in anxiety, frustration, and sadness, focusing on holding on to things that are no longer serving the connection and the relationship that we want to have with our kids, and maybe equally no longer serving the relationship we want to have with ourselves and our future potential.
Check out the Small Jar website to register for the class. My friends, we could have 50 or more years left on this earth, a lifetime to live again, and some of us are telling ourselves the most important and beautiful chapter is over. What if you're just getting started? How many times have you told your child that they have the ability to do whatever they want to do in life? At what point did you stop believing that was possible for you? My friend, you love unconditionally.
You can choose to feel connection unconditionally, and you can also decide to create purpose both as a mom with grown kids and as a woman embarking on her next chapter. What could be possible for you, 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.
