THOUGHTS MOMS PARENTING TEENS AND ADULT KIDS ARE ASHAMED THEY THINK—“MY KID'S LEAVING AND I THOUGHT I'D BE USED TO THIS BY NOW” | EP. 216
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 had a thought as a mom and then immediately felt terrible for thinking it? Believe me, you're not alone, and you're truly not a bad mom for thinking it. In this series on the thoughts us moms are ashamed we think, I'm exploring these thoughts and where they're coming from. Because when you shift from judgment to understanding, that's when everything changes. Let's dive in.
Hello, my friend.
There's something I find so fascinating, and you might relate to this too. It's how having your kids home again after they've been away brings such a mix of emotions. At first, you're just so happy to see them.
That moment when they walk in the door, it's like they're home. They're safe. They're with you.
The truth is, when they're away, you miss them. You miss the essence of them. And then there's something so comforting about having the house full again.
It brings a certain vibrancy back into your life that feels missing when they're away. All of a sudden, dinner has become more of an event again. There's always someone around to talk to, or at least always someone in the kitchen, assuming it's not early in the morning.
Your kids' lives also have so much in them now, so much that you don't always get to see or know about. And if you're lucky, you get these little moments when you capture just a bit of insight into what's going on in their minds and their hearts and their lives. Over the holidays, I really tried to focus on being present for the beauty of all of that.
Just soaking my boys up, cherishing the time that we had together. At the same time, it's also true that when your kids are home, there is more chaos and mess, more coming and going. You can feel a little bit like you're back in that stage of life where you can't really make plans because you're trying to figure out what everyone else's plans are.
Even something as simple as making dinner becomes a logistical challenge. Because even when everyone says they're going to be home, their plans change. Or they tell you they won't be home, and then suddenly they are, and they're wondering what there is to eat.
And there is so much eating at all hours of the day and night. The kitchen is constantly a mess. We almost always run out of glasses because they're all up in my son's rooms.
And let's not forget waking up in the middle of the night and wondering if everyone made it back home safely. It's somehow something you learn to let go of when they're at school. But suddenly when they're home, you're back on the night watch, not quite relaxed until you know everyone is safe in their beds.
The truth is, what I've found in my experience is that there is a certain amount of freedom and ease that comes with the empty nest. You get back to a place where your life is a little more your own again. You make decisions based on what you want.
And I'm not saying that my home is entirely neat and organized when my kids aren't around. But somehow it feels a little bit easier to stay on top of everything when they're not. So when your kids are home, there's a bit of chaos that comes back with that.
And that's sort of the flip side of having them home again. But with all that said, it can still be surprising how sad it feels when they leave again. And it can feel like that's true every single time they leave.
You get used to having them around again. And even with all of the ups and downs of having them home, there's something that just feels so right about it. Something that feels so whole.
But the goodbyes keep coming. They come home, and then they leave. And it can feel surprisingly hard each time.
You can find yourself thinking, I thought I'd be used to this by now. I think in this stage of motherhood, we tend to see how fleeting these moments are. The moments when you have your kids back with you.
You know it's only a short window. So on the one hand, of course, we feel a twinge of sadness when we have to say goodbye. But what I've noticed is that we can often feel caught off guard by the depth of the emotional experience we can have when we're saying goodbye.
And I think that's particularly true when it's not the first time. When you approach the empty nest, it feels normal to feel this big emotional build-up as you contemplate that first college drop-off. It's a big moment.
I remember the first time I did it with my oldest son. I cried for months before. Just about any time I thought about him leaving, I would tear up.
And then that moment when you actually leave. It feels like stepping off a cliff. I remember saying to my husband, are we really doing this? Are we really leaving our baby here? But the thing is, you know that moment is going to be emotional.
Honestly, we expect it to be hard. And so we give ourselves grace for that. To the extent we can, we even prepare for it.
But we don't really give ourselves the same grace for the repeated goodbyes. For the times when saying goodbye still feels really hard, even though we've done this before. Sometimes even after we've done it many times before.
There are so many possible layers to why this experience feels so hard. And what I want to do here is invite you to explore which of these might resonate with you. Because at a very basic level, one of the layers is this thought, I should be over this by now.
It's almost like we think there's a statute of limitations on our grief around entering the empty nest. Like, I know what this feels like. I've done this before, so I don't understand why this is still so hard for me.
Underneath that thought, there's so much judgment. This sense that something must be wrong with us for still feeling this way. And I want to point out something really important here.
Because anytime we're judging ourselves, we're shutting down curiosity. When we tell ourselves this shouldn't be happening or something's wrong with me, we're essentially saying that we've done something wrong by simply feeling the way that we feel. And more often than not, instead of getting curious about what's actually going on for us, we just push against the feeling.
We bottle it up or try to push past it. It's like we tell ourselves, I shouldn't be feeling this way, so I'm just not going to. So we swallow it down, try to distract ourselves and move on with our lives.
But the reality is resisting emotions doesn't help us process them. It actually does the opposite and often makes us feel worse. The emotions actually start to feel bigger.
So if you've experienced this repeated grief, this sadness that comes up every time your kid leaves again, I want to invite you to consider that if this is happening for you, nothing has gone wrong. You're simply experiencing a human emotion. And instead of judging yourself, I wonder if you could just get curious about what might be true for you, about what's going on in your mind that's creating the sadness you're feeling.
And when you do that, when you shift out of judgment and into curiosity, the next question becomes, what am I thinking that's creating this heavy feeling? Because for many of us, the sadness isn't just one thing. It's not just missing them. It's the meaning our minds make about what their absence says about our lives.
One of the thoughts that comes up when I'm exploring this with my clients is my life isn't as good without my kids around. And look, for some of us, we just love having our kids at home with us. We love having the house full.
It's interesting and alive. And when we're lucky enough to have a close relationship with our kids, or just lucky enough to love our role as a mom and the value and meaning it brings to our lives, it makes sense that we cherish these times together. But then the quiet hits.
I've had clients say to me, I don't think I realized how much better my life feels when my kids are around. This realization can feel difficult, not because there's anything wrong with loving being with your kids, but it's more facing the perceived reality that life without your kids feels less worthy and meaningful. And if you've ever felt this way, here's something you might notice happening in your mind.
When our kids are home, we contend to focus on all of the good parts, those moments together and the energy and the full house, that feeling that your life feels rich and vibrant. But then when they leave, we focus on the emptiness, the quiet and the stillness. We focus on what's missing.
Being with our kids gets painted as the good life, and being at home without them feels like it's the lesser version of life. And so not only can we fall into a sort of all or nothing thinking about our lives, but that contrast can also feel very fixed. Like this is just the truth about my life now.
Like the meaning and richness live over there in those times with my kids, and that this quieter, emptier version of my life is just what's left without them. One of my clients will often say to me that her cup feels so full when she's with her kids. And so I started asking her, why do you think you dump out that cup when you're not with your kids? Another related thought that can be underneath the heaviness we feel when we say goodbye is this sense of grief that a meaningful chapter of our life is over.
Time is so fleeting, and these repeated goodbyes are these continual reminders that this phase of life isn't temporary. If anything, the time between the goodbyes and the welcome home hugs feels like it gets longer and longer. And so in a big way, the sadness isn't just about what life feels like right now.
It's about what your mind is telling you about the future. It's like our minds start to attach permanence to our grief. Like we're just going to have to get used to this feeling of loss and emptiness when our kids aren't around.
And for some moms, there's another layer of thought that goes something like, as my kids grow up and move away, I don't know whether I'm going to be a part of their lives in the same way anymore. I hear this when clients talk about their kids acting distant and disconnected from them, even before they've left for college. But I also hear this from clients when their kids decide to live far away.
They know intellectually that this is just part of their kids' growth. They know their kids get to choose and that they should choose how their life looks. These moms certainly don't want to hold their kids back.
But at the same time, we can be left feeling like our kids are creating these separate lives, and we don't know where we fit. For many of us, it's not even that we think that our kids don't love us. It's more that we worry that our place in their life isn't guaranteed anymore.
What's so interesting and beautiful about the clients I've worked with who have worked through these layers of grief and saying goodbye to their kids, is that they have all invested so much of their love and energy into being moms. And look, I think all of us do this. But when I think about these moms in particular, I see a group of women who have made their kids their everything in such a beautiful way.
And that's not to say that all of them have perfect relationships with their kids, or that their kids are living these perfect lives, or that any of the process of raising their kids has been easy. It's more that their perspective about their role as a mom in their life when they're with their kids is that it's meaningful, and valuable, and joyful. I mean, the truth is, there are some moms who don't feel this way about raising their kids.
So if you happen to be one of the lucky moms who love and embrace the messy chaos of being a mom, it's actually a beautiful thing, something worthy of celebration. And so when you're with your kids, by all means, love every minute of it. Ignore the dishes on the counter, and the piles of laundry, and the uncertainty of who's coming to dinner.
When I think of these moms, I think of women who are present for these moments of their life with their kids, in a way that some of us miss, because we're stuck in the chaos and the mess of it all. So if you love being a mom, love it. Don't apologize for it.
But if you then find yourself feeling sad and empty when your big kids leave, feeling like your life isn't as good, or worrying that it's always going to feel like this, or that you're not sure what role you're going to have in your kids' future life, I want to invite you to get curious about this. Let's go back to that question I asked my client. When your kids leave, after you've filled your cup by being with them, why do you dump it out when they leave? Because the truth is, it's not life doing this to us.
We dump out the cup. And we also fill it back up. Our kids being near us physically, or the distance we are from them, they're just circumstances.
And we can choose to think about those circumstances in whatever way we want. Some of us, frankly, might think, I can't wait until my kid goes back to college. But others of us think, I love it when they're home.
I love soaking my kids up and hearing their stories and learning about their life. I love that the house is full. We fill our cup by thinking about our kids being home in a way that creates these happy, connected, and full emotions.
We do that. But then our kids leave, the circumstances change, and we decide that we can't feel connected unless they're near us. Even that we can't enjoy learning about their life unless they're sitting across the dinner table.
I mean, really think about it. What's stopping you from feeling connected to your big kid, even when they're not at home? I know you never stop loving them. So why do you stop allowing yourself to experience the fullness of your life, even when they're away? The truth is, when our kids leave, what changes is the story we start telling ourselves about what it means.
When the house gets quiet, our minds fill that space with a story about emptiness, about loss, about something important being gone. And when we believe that story, quiet starts feeling really happy. Here's the thing.
When we believe that the fullness and the richness of our life only exists when our kids are physically with us, we stop experiencing the quiet as neutral or open or just different. Instead, the quiet starts to feel like evidence that something important is missing, that the best part of your life exists somewhere outside of you. And I know it feels like you're not consciously choosing this.
It just feels like the truth right now, that our lives are full and meaningful when our kids are around and empty and less meaningful when they're not. But it's worth getting curious about the meaning you're assigning to the quiet. Because quiet on its own is just quiet.
But it's the story layered on top of it, the story about loss or lack or something important being gone. That's what makes the quiet feel heavy. The truth is, you are the author of your emotional experience.
You get to decide what to make the circumstances of your life mean. And so the question is, are you making those decisions intentionally? Or are you using the sadness you feel in saying goodbye as evidence that something must be wrong? My friend, if you recognize yourself in this, if you notice how your mind assigns meaning to the quiet that feels heavy, I want you to know that there is nothing wrong with you. But you do have an opportunity now, in the midst of this season of change, to make intentional decisions about how you want to feel in this stage of motherhood.
And this is exactly the kind of work I do with moms inside of Mom 2.0. The truth is that you don't have to settle for a life without kids at home being less. But you do have the ability to understand what's shaping that experience and choose how you want to show up for it. You can learn all about the program through the link in the show notes.
My friend, as you send your kids back to school or out into their lives and find yourself feeling sad and thinking, I should be over this by now, I want to invite you to pause and get curious. Notice how quickly your mind wants to turn your sadness into something that feels heavier. When you learn how to stop judging yourself for how you feel and start paying attention to what your mind is doing in these moments of goodbye and quiet, you create space for a very different relationship with this chapter of motherhood.
One where the meaning and the fullness of your life isn't something you wait to feel, but something you get to create. Until next time, my friend.
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.
