THREE GIFTS FOR MOMS PARENTING TEENS AND ADULT KIDS—HOW LETTING GO, CONNECTION, AND COMPASSION TRANSFORM THE STAGE OF MOTHERHOOD | EP. 211
Welcome to the Almost Empty Nest Podcast, where we moms of teens and college kids reframe what letting go really means to feel more connected, confident, and at peace.
I'm your host, Master Coach Jennifer Collins. Have you ever found yourself wanting something different this season, whether during the holidays or just any time of year? Maybe you want more ease in your relationship with your big kid, or more peace for yourself as you navigate the constant change of this stage of motherhood. In this episode, I'm sharing three powerful gifts you can give yourself that will deepen your connection with your kids and help you show up with more intention, peace, and self-trust, both now and in the year ahead.
These gifts don't change your kids, but they will change how you experience this season of motherhood. Let's dive in. Hello, my friend.
I hope as you settle into the holidays that a lot of the stress of preparing and planning and shopping is behind you. While there are certainly celebrations ahead and still work to be done, I hope you're starting to settle into a little bit of a sense that you can lean into the joy and into your desire to create peace for yourself this season. As moms, I think we so often tend to focus on all the ways we can support other people in our lives.
And so I hope that I can be a small voice in your head, reminding you that you are worthy of celebration and care and attention, that you are worthy of taking time and space to invest in your own self-care. When I first became a mother and I was grappling with the huge transition that happens when you have an infant and you're grappling with the demands of motherhood and the relentlessness of another being needing you, I remember my mom often saying to me, self-care isn't selfish. And she would say that in the context of me finding a time to take a nap or asking for help or really doing any number of very small things just to care for my own need for a break, it was an invitation to remember to make space to create a little peace and even joy in my life separate from everyone else.
Because look, motherhood brings with it so many beautiful moments and is at times so incredibly rewarding. But it also asks a lot of you. And what I've found over the course of raising my boys is the more intentional I am about caring for myself, the more love and strength and presence I bring to everyone in my life, particularly my sons.
With that in mind, I thought I would give you three invitations that are gifts that you can give yourself, not only over the holidays, but throughout the entire year to come. Because my friend, if you can consistently give these gifts to yourself, you are going to change your relationships and your entire experience of your life. And I want to hone in on that one phrase, give these gifts to yourself.
Because what you'll notice as I go through these gifts is that these are truly gifts that only you can give yourself. So the first gift that only you can give yourself is that you give other people back their emotional experience. And let me explain what I mean by that.
With other people that we care about, and actually even people that we don't care so much about, we can tend to internalize their emotions and reactions in a way that means something about us or for us. And this goes even beyond taking things personally. This is just often how we experience other people and the way that they live their life.
I want to invite you to think about how often, when your kid's in a bad mood, how often you feel responsible to cheer them up, or you feel this pressure to find out what's wrong, right? Like there's something bad happening and you feel like you need to get to the bottom of it. Or you might get annoyed because they're always in a bad mood and you feel like it impacts how much you enjoy being around them. It influences how you feel when you go home.
Because let's be honest, sometimes when our kids are moody or acting in a certain way, as much as we love them, it's painful to be around them. And yes, of course, when other people are in a bad mood, or particularly when our kids are in a bad mood, there's that age-old feeling of taking their behavior or moods personally, feeling like it's somehow your fault, or that you've done something wrong. So when other people feel negative emotions, we feel responsible.
We might want to fix it, or understand why. We might feel annoyed, like our life is impacted, or we take things personally. These are all examples of us taking responsibility for how other people feel.
And look, on the one hand, it makes sense. We care about other people and we don't want them to be hurting or in a bad mood. But also, when we take responsibility for other people's painful emotions, we're making it about us.
And here's something else to consider. What we don't even realize we're doing when we take responsibility for how other people feel, is that we're thinking they shouldn't feel the way that they feel. Think about it.
When your mother-in-law comes over and she's in a judgmental mood, and she's telling you how to cook the holiday meal, or she says something about how messy the house is, whatever is going on in her mind, she's coming from a judgmental place. And we think she shouldn't be. That she shouldn't feel judgmental or grumpy.
We also do it to our partners or significant others. They're tired or not interested in having a conversation about something. Maybe they're ambivalent or even frustrated to be having the same conversation.
Or maybe they're equally unsure of how to handle something and so they don't really want to talk about it yet. But what we often do is that we think that they shouldn't feel the way that they feel. We get annoyed when they're tired or ambivalent or closed off.
And we definitely do it with our kids. Something's bothering them when they're sad or angry or moody, and we don't want them to feel that way. The fact of the matter is it's uncomfortable for us when other people have negative emotions.
And when we feel that discomfort, our brain immediately wants to shut it down. Not necessarily for their sake, but for ours. We feel uncomfortable, like we've done something wrong or like something in our life is going wrong.
And so we feel compelled to fix it or change it. We want to change how the other person feels because our experience of their emotion feels uncomfortable. It feels like it steals our ability to be at peace.
And we don't often realize we're doing this because caring about the people we love feels like such a noble, important reason to want to make people feel better. But consider that so much of what we might interpret as helping or managing how other people feel is really an attempt to manage our own emotional discomfort. The bottom line is that when we think someone shouldn't feel the way that they feel, we're arguing with reality.
We're essentially resisting the truth of their human experience in that moment. And this resistance always creates more pain for us. If your mother-in-law is feeling judgmental, she's already feeling that way whether you approve of it or not.
Or if your partner is tired or ambivalent, that's what's true for them. If your kid is sad or moody, that's their emotional reality. Your belief that they shouldn't feel that way doesn't change their experience.
It only builds up your own frustration. But what if nothing has gone wrong? What if negative emotion is simply part of being human? When you embrace that truth, you become empowered to truly let other people feel how they need to feel. And this is so incredibly freeing.
And I'm not at all saying that you can't try to make other people feel better or find out what's wrong when someone is acting a certain way. Or even that you shouldn't speak up if someone's acting disrespectfully or rudely. You get to do all of that and then let it go.
You don't need to fix it. You don't need to take responsibility for it. You don't need to make it your problem.
You don't even need to make it mean that there's something wrong with a relationship when people act that way. This is just who this other person needs to be right now. And you get to decide how you want to respond to that.
The reality is when you take responsibility for the way other people feel, it steals your peace. It actually steals the connection you feel with that other person. And it also makes you feel like your emotional experience is dependent on everyone else being okay so you can feel okay.
And this, my friend, is exhausting. So the first gift I want to invite you to give yourself is to literally let other people feel the way they need to feel. The second gift I want to offer you that only you have the power to give yourself is to connect with the people that you love without conditions.
Now, I preface all of this by saying, first of all, this is with the people that you love. And second of all, when I say without conditions, I don't mean without boundaries. And here's the difference.
When I'm talking about conditions, I'm talking about expectations in your mind, things that you're waiting for other people to do or ways that you want other people to behave in order for you to feel connected to them. In contrast, boundaries are decisions you make about how you will respond, whether it's to someone else or to someone else's actions or to a situation in your life. They're decisions you make.
So conditions are your expectations, conditions that you put on a relationship in order for you to feel how you want to feel about it. And boundaries are decisions you make about how you show up in a relationship. Now, you should always have boundaries, even with the people that you love.
And when I'm talking about boundaries, I don't just mean telling your kid how much screen time they can have or how much money they can spend. I'm not talking about rules and consequences. When I talk about boundaries in your relationships, I'm talking about how you decide how you're going to show up to that relationship.
Notice this is all about you and the decisions you make. So some examples of boundaries are if someone talks to you in a way that you feel is disrespectful, you can set the boundary of saying, I'm going to walk away until we can have a pleasant conversation. Notice how there's no fight.
There's no arguing and telling the other person they shouldn't be saying those things. There's just acknowledging, that's not okay with me right now. Therefore, I'm going to remove myself from the situation.
Or let's say your big kid is texting you repeatedly during your workday, asking for something, and they seem increasingly annoyed when you don't respond. You can set the boundary, when I'm working, I can't respond right away. I'll respond when I can.
But if you need something from me, maybe you should ask before or after work. You make it clear you're not ignoring them, but you also can't make yourself available 24-7 to your kid. You always get to set these types of boundaries with other people.
It's about how you show up to that relationship. And by the way, going back to gift number one, you can also let other people feel how they need to feel about your boundaries without taking responsibility for that. So again, boundaries are simply decisions you make around how you show up in a relationship.
You actually make these decisions all of the time without even realizing that they're boundaries. But conditions in contrast are expectations that we place on other people and how they show up to the relationship. So it's sometimes thinking things like I can only feel connected to you if you sit down and have dinner with me.
Or I only feel close to you when you text home on a regular basis. We often try to set boundaries around these things. Moms will tell me I need to tell my kid to call home at least once a week.
Or have dinner with me a few times over the holidays. We think of these as boundaries we need to set. But what consequence can we realistically enforce around these types of boundaries? We actually don't have any power to make someone else respect the types of boundaries we set around how they connect back with us.
So really what we're doing is we're putting conditions or setting expectations around how we think the other person needs to act in order for us to feel connected to them. But notice how already in your mind what you've done is that you've set yourself up to be disappointed if that expectation isn't met. So what we really do in our minds is that we rob ourselves of feeling connected to this other person because we set these conditions that they may or may not meet.
So this second gift is to connect with the people that you love without conditions. This means leaning into unconditional love and recognizing when you're setting yourself up to feel disconnected because you're setting expectations of someone else that they may not be able to meet. What we don't understand about connection is that this feeling isn't something other people create for you.
It isn't dependent on how often they call or how much time they spend at home unless you decide that it is dependent on that. The truth is connection is something you create based on how you choose to think about the people that you love. And the beautiful thing is you get to feel connected to them whether they meet your expectations or not.
And this is such an incredible gift you can give yourself because even the people who love us back don't always show up for us in exactly the way that we want all of the time. So the gift we can give ourselves is to stop waiting to feel connected to the people we love. So to recap, the first gift is to give other people back their feelings, to let them have their emotional experience without taking responsibility for it.
And the second gift is to connect with the people that you love without conditions. The third gift I want to invite you to give yourself is the gift of treating yourself with compassion. Now there are so many layers to this, but at its core, I think of compassion as honoring your emotional experience.
It's giving yourself permission to feel what you need to feel without judgment, without pressure, without immediately trying to fix it or make it go away. What so many of us do instead is that we judge ourselves for feeling uncomfortable emotions. We think, I shouldn't feel this way, or I shouldn't let this bother me.
We basically pile self-judgment on top of whatever we're feeling, and then we wonder why we feel overwhelmed or why we react in ways we don't like. So what if instead you met your emotions with curiosity instead of judgment? Instead of telling yourself, I shouldn't feel this way, ask yourself, what's really bothering me right now? What you might notice is that you could be taking responsibility for how someone else feels or setting conditions or expectations on how someone else behaves. And you know what? You get to feel how you need to feel about that.
You're allowed to feel disappointed when someone doesn't show up the way that you hoped. And you get to feel hurt when your teen says something rude to you, even if you know it's not really about you. You're allowed to feel frustrated when someone else's mood or choices impact your day.
Your emotions are never wrong, but they also don't necessarily mean something has gone wrong. You are just experiencing your life through your emotions in a very human way. When I think about approaching yourself with compassion, I think about giving yourself the space to acknowledge your feelings without turning them against you.
Notice when you start to judge yourself for being sensitive or for caring too much. What if instead you could give yourself the gift of acknowledging, of course, I feel this way right now. It makes sense.
When you do this, you stop fighting with your own emotional reality. And here's a way to visualize what I'm talking about. Imagine looking at yourself as you would have when your own child was a toddler.
Imagine your own heart as a small child who's hurting or anxious or overwhelmed. If your toddler came to you with tears in their eyes or feeling overwhelmed, you wouldn't say you shouldn't feel that way or stop overreacting. You would bend down and you would take that child in your arms and you would hold them and you'd say, it's okay.
I'm here. Tell me what's wrong. You would meet your child with love and compassion and curiosity.
You wouldn't even necessarily feel this anxiety of needing to fix it right away. Remember with our kids when they were little, there was always this feeling of I'm here. I'm in this with you.
Whatever it is, we can get through this together. What if you could give yourself that same love and tenderness? When you treat yourself with compassion, you become your own safe place. You actually start to show up for yourself the same way you show up for everyone else in your life who you love.
And my friend, this is such a profound gift. So throughout the rest of this holiday season and truly as you move through the year ahead, I want to invite you to hold these three gifts close. The first is to give other people back their emotional experience.
Let them feel how they need to feel without making it your job to fix it or manage it. The second gift is to connect with the people that you love without conditions, to stop waiting for them to show up in a certain way before you allow yourself to feel close to them. And the third gift is to treat yourself with compassion, to honor your emotional experience with tenderness and curiosity.
My friend, these three gifts will transform your experience of your life. They change how you experience your relationships and how much peace you bring to your life. When you practice approaching life in this way, you find that you let go of the weight of having to manage and control all of these things that are truly out of your control.
But instead, you connect with the power that you truly do have in your life. And that is the way that you show up for yourself. And my friend, you don't have to do any of this alone.
I am here to support you and help you access these gifts as you create more peace and connection in this ever-evolving chapter of motherhood. Wishing you a beautiful and joyful holiday season full of peace and connection that you create. Happy holidays, my friend.
Until next time.
If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love for you to check out my next free masterclass. There's a link in the show notes. You have more power than you think, my friend.
