THOUGHTS MOMS PARENTING TEENS AND ADULT KIDS ARE ASHAMED THEY THINK—“I DON'T FEEL CLOSE TO MY KID ANYMORE” | EP. 222
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.
I remember so clearly a long stretch of time where I felt like my relationship with my son was changing for the worse in ways that felt irreparable. He'd stop talking to me. He'd stop sharing what was on his mind.
And when I could tell that there was something clearly wrong, he still wouldn't let me in. I kept trying to parent him and connect with him in the same ways that I always had, because it hadn't been that long before when he would open his heart to me and share everything. To be honest, back then, he sometimes even shared things I didn't even really want to know.
But I felt like I knew what was in his head and in his heart. And even when that knowledge made me uncomfortable, because there were parts of his life I couldn't fix for him, like friendships or relationships or things he struggled with, I at least felt like I had the ability to connect with him, to find out what was wrong so I could help or at least try to offer my perspective, to try to make him feel better, even if it didn't always work. Those times were honestly hard enough.
But then he started shutting me out. There were so many layers to how painful that was. And I'm not even sure where to start.
So let's start with a thought I hear from so many of my clients. I don't feel close to my kid anymore. If you've ever felt this with your own kid, you're not alone.
This is something so many moms experience at some point as their kids grow up. And it hurts. It's like a cut to the heart.
Because we remember a time when connecting with our kids felt easier and rewarding. It can feel like the relationship is being torn away from you. When your kids are little, parenting is still a challenge.
In fact, I remember when my boys were little, I still felt overwhelmed and worried and unsure if I was doing it right. But I will say that at least when our kids are younger, they're often more open and receptive to us. I sometimes think about those years, maybe between 8 and 10, when kids are old enough to be interesting and fun and also not a ton of work anymore.
But they still also want to hang out with you. They expect to have dinner with you and they want to go out with you. They think a movie night is a great idea.
They're excited about family trips. And let's be honest, we had a lot more say in how their time was spent back then. We could pretty much decide for ourselves what we were doing on the weekends.
Do you remember actually planning a family vacation without needing everyone else's buy-in? It feels like a lifetime ago. And I want to stop here and acknowledge that at least for me, I know I wasn't walking around at the time thinking, this is perfect. I'm such a great parent and everything is always going the way that I want.
Because that was absolutely not the case. But now looking back, I sometimes wonder if I didn't appreciate what I had as much as I should have at the time. Almost like you don't know what you've got until it's gone.
So for me, when it comes to my relationship with my oldest, that drastic change in the relationship I had with him in high school led me to think back to how good it had been back then for me. And the truth is, all of us experience these changes or shifts in our relationships differently. It depends on who our kids are and who we are and really our expectations for our relationship.
But there are these little shifts I think all of us moms experience in different ways. Sometimes the feeling of disconnection is subtle. Your kids start sharing a little less.
They have plans with friends instead of wanting to hang out with you. Or they say things like, I have to study. I can't eat dinner with a family tonight.
And in these moments, there isn't even necessarily a negative tone to they're pulling away. It's just the reality of who they're becoming. They're making independent choices now and those choices don't always include you.
And this alone can hurt. But sometimes there's another layer of disconnection where we start to take our kids' behavior a little personally. Maybe it's the eye rolls when you ask them to do something.
Or you ask questions and get one-word answers, no matter how many different ways you try to engage with your kid. Or they give you a look when you suggest a family outing and it feels like they're trying to find any reason not to go. You might find yourself thinking, it's not that they don't want to do something fun.
They just don't want to do it with me. And then there are times when it goes even further. Your kid seems to be actively pushing you away, talking back, breaking rules or crossing boundaries, telling you that you don't know what you're talking about, accusing you of being controlling.
They might even say things that are really mean and hard to misinterpret. They yelled, I hate you, Mom. You're ruining my life.
For me, my son didn't even say these words, but I felt them. It was the way he looked at me and also the way he avoided me. Wouldn't look me in the eye.
His behavior and his body language seemed to scream, Mom, whatever you're offering, whether it's advice or help or connection, I don't want it. Just stay out of my life. It was heartbreaking.
Wherever you've been with your own kid, whether you just feel sad seeing them become more independent or they're not including you as much as they used to, or if they're actively pushing you away, wherever you are, I want you to know I have been in all of these places with my boys, and it is really hard. I don't feel close to my kid anymore. That thought alone can carry so much weight.
And what I've noticed, both in my own experience and in my work with clients, is that when we think this, we tend to feel a wide range of emotions. The first is actually simple disappointment. Anytime reality doesn't meet your expectations, disappointment is your natural response.
But I've realized over time that disappointment itself has many layers. And a lot of those layers have to do with how important the expectation was to us in the first place. For example, I could wake up on a Monday morning and expect warm, sunny weather, but instead be met with rainy, 40-degree weather.
I might naturally feel disappointed, but it's not a heavy disappointment. It's more like, oh, that's too bad. Because with this expectation of what the weather's supposed to be, the stakes are really low.
Ultimately, the weather doesn't change my life. But when we're talking about something as important as feeling connected to our kids, disappointment feels very different. Because this isn't just a preference.
This is a relationship that matters so much to us. When that connection doesn't look the way we hoped it would, we typically interpret that to mean something. We might tell ourselves that our kid is being mean or hurtful, maybe disrespectful or selfish.
We often think that they shouldn't treat us this way. So often, we judge our kids for their behavior. But almost just as often, we turn that judgment back on ourselves.
We might start wondering if we didn't do a good enough job raising our kids, if we failed somehow to teach them how to be respectful or appreciative. Or we might worry that their distance means something bigger is wrong, that they're struggling and not telling us, or that they don't trust us enough to let us in. So now disappointment gets layered with anxiety.
We can also feel frustrated, especially if we've tried again and again to connect and nothing seems to work. And of course, we can feel hurt because this relationship does matter to us. There is no one on earth we care more about connecting with than our kids.
So when they don't connect back with us in the way that we hope, it can feel devastating. We can also fear that the relationship we have with our kids is broken and that it's not going to get any better. I've also worked with women who have been estranged from their kids, and it's an incredibly painful place to be.
There's often this overwhelming question of, how did we get here? How is this possible? I remember being in that space, feeling devastated and heartbroken. And all of this, the disappointment and the fear and the frustration, the anger, can bring up a tremendous amount of shame. Because we look at what we had with our kids and we think, I had something so special.
How did I mess this up? And the way we usually answer that question is by blaming ourselves. So if you're feeling disconnected from your kid right now, whether it's a subtle pulling away or something that feels much more serious, I want to offer you this. Instead of judging yourself, see if you can simply sit with the fact that your expectations and the reality of your experience with your big kid don't match.
Notice whether the word disappointment fully captures what you're feeling or whether there are other emotions there too. Hurt, sadness, anger, resentment, or guilt. Just notice.
Now when we're feeling this kind of emotional pain, our minds immediately tend to focus on what our kids should be doing differently. In other words, if they would just do X, I wouldn't feel Y. If they would just call more or share more or spend more time with me, then I could feel connected again. So our ability to reconnect becomes very dependent on our kids' behavior.
And so when we're experiencing our relationship with our kids in this way, feeling disconnected because of their behavior, it makes perfect sense that our next move is to try to get them to change. That's when we start brainstorming expectations and boundaries, thinking about how to have a conversation with them to establish some rules of engagement. Maybe you want to make it clear that they need to have dinner with you or talk to you when they get home from school.
If they're away at college, you're tempted to tell them how often they should call home or how quickly they should text back. We can also feel the urge to let our kids know how their behavior is making us feel. We want them to understand the impact they're having on us.
And we hope that our words will make them see, will make them care. And if you see yourself in this, it doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. For so many of us moms, connecting with our kids has been one of the primary ways we've felt close and needed and emotionally validated for years.
So when that connection starts to change, it can feel incredibly unsettling. And what's tricky is that our brain doesn't just take our kids' behavior at face value. Instead, we start to interpret it.
They didn't answer my text or they don't want to have dinner with me or they only say a few words when they get home. Those are the facts, but then our minds jump to something must be wrong. I'm losing my connection with them or if they don't want to connect with me, our relationship is broken.
Sometimes we're aware we're thinking these things and sometimes we're not. But either way, these thoughts create urgency, the feeling that something needs to be fixed. So we start wanting to restore the closeness, to get reassurance, or to bring things back to the way that they were, or at least something that feels familiar.
What I wish I had understood sooner is that in these moments, we're often reacting less to what our kid is actually doing and more to what we think the behavior means. The truth is these interpretations are such a normal and understandable reaction. We're moms who love our kids so much and we're navigating a relationship that's changing in ways we don't know how to respond to.
What makes these years of parenting our big kids so challenging is that we're still wired to parent in a way that worked when our kids were little, when closeness looked like being together and sharing and being open. But now the definition of connection is being renegotiated. When our kids were little, the truth is connection happened mostly on our terms and not because we were controlling, but because they genuinely needed us to take the lead.
We set the schedule, we created the moments for connection. So if we wanted to talk, we talked. If we wanted family time, we made it happen.
And if something felt off, we stepped in because that was our job. When our kids were little, connection followed the structure that we created and our kids relied on us for that. When you think about it, we were modeling what connection looks like or at least what our own interpretation of what connection should look like.
It was our way and it worked in that stage of our kids' lives. But as our kids grow up, they start to have more say in how and when they connect back with us. They're developing their own preferences and their own ways of relating.
And that means that even when we try to connect in the ways that used to work, they don't necessarily respond to us in the same way. The truth is that now our big kids want connection, but on their terms. Maybe they want shorter conversations or less frequent check-ins.
Maybe they need more space or more say in when they engage. And even when we tell ourselves that this is developmentally appropriate, it can still feel hard for us moms. For so long, connection happened in ways that felt familiar and reassuring to us.
And now that's changing. We find that we can't orchestrate the connection in the same way anymore. Suddenly we realize we're being asked to be more flexible and patient, more understanding.
And if we're honest, we don't want to have to do this because it feels a little bit like loss. Like we're giving something up. We don't want to lose our connection with our big kid, but it can feel like the only way to keep it is to give up control or even any say in how that connection happens.
And if I'm honest, it doesn't always feel fair. We've invested years building this relationship with our kids. We've organized our lives around them and we've done everything for them.
And so for some of us, and I know this was true for me, there's a thought that can come up that can be really uncomfortable to admit. Really that it doesn't seem like a lot to ask that they would just give me back a bit of the affection and care that I feel like I deserve. Honestly, it can make you feel a little resentful, but maybe also a little ashamed because we feel needy or selfish, entitled, and we don't want to have to feel that way.
But we do. I know I did. But here's the thing.
Of course we want connection. Of course we want to feel seen and valued in a relationship we've poured so much into. Where things get complicated is when that feeling of deserving a certain type of connection starts driving our urgency to tell our kids how they need to engage and connect with us.
Because if we believe we're owed a certain kind of connection, then we can start to feel justified to push for it. My friend, wanting connection is not the problem. But demanding it, even from a place of love, isn't actually how to repair your connection.
So this brings us back to this question of how do you rebuild that connection? For me, the answer wasn't telling my son how he needed to behave or engage with me, or telling him how his behavior was impacting me. But I'll be honest, early on I tried those things. They didn't work.
Instead, what I had to learn was that my pain was coming from needing the relationship to look a certain way in order for me to feel okay. And look, I don't say this lightly, because the relationship I had with my son at the time looked nothing like what I wanted it to. My son wasn't talking to me.
Things were not good. But also I realized I couldn't talk him into engaging with me differently because that's what I wanted. The truth is, no matter what my son did, or does, I still love him.
That is a connection I have to him whether he engages back with me or not. I will always love my boys. And from this standpoint, nothing they do changes my love for them.
So what I really needed to learn was how to stay present with the discomfort of not getting the reassurance I wanted from him that our relationship was okay. Even then, even when my son wouldn't engage with me, I did know in my heart that he loved me somewhere in there. In fact, I also knew that there were a lot of things going on with him that had nothing to do with me.
And the truth was, he was so caught up in the challenge of his own emotional experience that he didn't have room to worry about his impact on me. In fact, what I've realized in retrospect, now that we're able to talk openly about what happened back then, is that he still doesn't fully realize the impact that period of time had on me. Because honestly, I think that he so trusted that I was always going to be there for him, that he felt safe to be who he needed to be as he figured out who he was, that pushing me away for a period of time for him didn't involve any risk because he knew I would be there for him no matter what.
The way I started thinking about it back then was that no matter how he acted, I was going to leave the light on. I was going to be a safe space for him to come back to no matter how long it took. And what that meant was that I stopped needing him to be a certain way for me to feel connected to him.
I had to learn how to sit with my own hurt and disappointment without making it mean that we would never find our way back to an open and close relationship. When you can lean into the unconditional love I know you have for your big kid, and you can also manage your own discomfort in things not looking the way you'd like them to, this is where you gain the power to show up in a way that stops putting pressure on your big kid to make you feel okay. And that, my friend, changes everything.
Learning how to create this, how to find safety in yourself and invite connection without forcing it, this is the work I do with my clients in Mom 2.0. This program is about becoming the version of you who can stay emotionally steady as your relationship with your big kid evolves. So if you're listening to this and thinking, I don't feel close to my kid anymore, I want to invite you to consider that distance doesn't have to mean disconnection, and your big kid pulling away doesn't mean you're losing them. Sometimes it even means that they trust the relationship enough to take the space they need to figure out who they need to be.
That doesn't make it easy, and it doesn't take away the hurt, but it does mean that the connection isn't gone. It's just changing. And the most powerful thing you can do isn't to hold on tighter or to try to force connection.
It's to become the place inside of yourself where you feel steady enough to love without pressure and to trust that connection can find its way back in its own time. This is what it means to leave the light on. Connection doesn't require control, it actually requires trust in your big kid and yourself.
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.
