THE LIFE YOU'RE MISSING WHILE YOU'RE PREPARING FOR THE WORST WHEN PARENTING TEENS AND NAVIGATING THE EMPTY NEST | EP. 269
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.
How many moments of your life have you already missed because your mind is always busy worrying about what might happen next? How many conversations with your child? Or how many ordinary moments in your life have you only been half-present for because your mind was somewhere else, imagining the worst, trying to protect you from a future that hasn't even happened? In today's episode, I'm talking about why our brains do this, and why worrying doesn't actually prepare us for what's ahead. I'll also talk about why learning to trust yourself may be one of the most important skills that you can develop, not just as a mom, but as a woman navigating this season of life. Let's dive in.
Hello, my friend. The other day, I was scrolling on Instagram, as you tend to do when you have a few minutes to yourself and you don't quite know what to do with them. A video caught my attention.
It was a couple in their 60s walking on the beach, and the caption said something like, Now that we're in our 60s, we're taking life a little slower. We're not chasing money. We're enjoying the quiet.
We're savoring this season of our lives. To be honest, there was something about the post that hit a nerve, so I clicked on the comments. The very first one said, My husband has dementia, and I'm caring for him around the clock.
This feels like la-la land. It struck me how completely different these two women's experiences were. One was describing a season of freedom and lightness.
The other was living through something incredibly heavy, something objectively exhausting and heartbreaking. But then I noticed where my own mind went. If I'm honest, I can't identify with either of these women's experiences.
I certainly don't spend my days walking on the beach, soaking up every quiet moment. My boys are independent now, and I've built a life that I love, especially coaching moms in midlife. This work is so meaningful to me.
But if I'm really honest, I've also filled my life with a lot, so much so that I don't know how often I simply enjoy it. At the same time, reading that comment about dementia immediately brought up fear, because none of us knows what's coming. None of us knows what the next 10 or 20 years will bring.
I found myself feeling grateful that wasn't my life, but then almost immediately wondering if one day it might be. And then my mind started doing this thing that it does. I look at that couple walking on the beach, and instead of thinking, maybe that will be us someday, my brain immediately starts listing all the reasons it probably won't be.
We'll have to keep working to support the boys, or to be able to afford our lives. And then on top of that, you start picturing all of these other future challenges with your kid, with your health. Have you ever noticed how quickly your brain does this? It looks at the beautiful, positive possibilities for your future, and it says, well, don't get your hopes up.
But then it looks at the most painful version of the future and says, yep, that could be you. And what happens when our minds do this is that we stop experiencing our lives as they actually are right now. We find ourselves living some imagined terrible future, where our big kid is struggling, or our spouse gets sick, or our own body starts to fail.
And the thing is, none of these fears are ridiculous. That's what makes this so hard. We're not talking about completely irrational fears.
We're talking about real possibilities, real things that happen to real people every single day. I think that's part of why our brains get so attached to this kind of future-focused worry. It feels almost like preparation.
Like if we think about all of the things that could happen, somehow we'll be more ready if they do. But I'm not actually sure that that's true. Because in that moment, sitting there with my phone in my hand, nothing had changed about my life.
I wasn't facing some immediate crisis. And yet emotionally, in my mind, I was already experiencing the pain of a future that hadn't happened, that might never happen. And we do this all the time, especially with our big kids.
Maybe your son sleeps until noon during the summer, and your mind immediately goes to, how is he ever going to keep a job? Or your daughter still hasn't started her college applications, and suddenly you're imagining what her entire future is going to look like if she doesn't get moving. Or maybe your big kid is struggling to find any type of job after college. Or they're dating someone you don't love.
Or they can't seem to remember a doctor's appointment that you've reminded them about 10 times. And here's the thing, I don't think we recognize in those moments that we're catastrophizing. What it really feels like is that we're thinking ahead.
It feels like being a responsible mom who's paying attention to what's happening, so she can figure out a way to avoid that terrible outcome for her kid. I've experienced so many versions of this with my own boys over the years. There have been times where I've watched them struggle or make choices that really have scared me.
And my brain very quickly, very convincingly, starts writing a story about where those choices were going to lead, what their lives were going to look like in five years or 10 years, whether or not they were going to be okay. I remember lying awake so many nights, genuinely grieving a future that hadn't even happened. Our brains run these entire movie scenarios, and we very rarely stop ourselves and say, but my child is actually okay right now.
Right now, in this moment, they are fine. And I'm lying awake suffering over something that only exists in my imagination. And again, that doesn't mean that our fears aren't valid, but they haven't yet become a catastrophe.
We look at our kids in this messy version of themselves that they are right now, and we make a decision in our minds that somehow that predetermines the whole story of their lives, that they're never going to launch, they're always going to struggle, that they're going to make some terrible mistake that derails everything. And then, on top of all of this, we take the blame, that I've somehow failed them, that there must be something I've missed. How did I raise a kid like this? It's fascinating, isn't it? Our brains don't seem nearly as interested in imagining all of the wonderful ways our children's lives could play out.
We don't look at that 17-year-old sleeping until noon and think, one day he is going to be an incredible father. We don't look at our 22-year-old who's struggling to find a job and think, this challenge is going to make her incredibly resilient. No, our brains almost always fill in the future with fear, as though fear is somehow more believable than hope.
And when you really think about it, this is truly because your primitive brain has one job. It isn't actually to make you happy. It's not to help you enjoy your life.
Your brain's job is literally to keep you alive, which means it's constantly scanning your life for danger, constantly asking what could go wrong. The problem is, your primitive brain doesn't distinguish between a tiger chasing you through the woods and your 22-year-old not returning your text for three days. To your nervous system, uncertainty is uncertainty, and when it finds it, it fills in the blanks, and usually with the worst possible story.
So I wonder, does any of this worrying actually prepare us for the worst? Think about it for a minute. How many times have you spent hours imagining some terrible thing that never happened? The number of car accidents you've seen in your mind, or the phone call you've almost expected to get in the middle of the night? The conversation where your kid tells you they've failed or made some terrible mistake? How many nights have you lain awake at night thinking about all of the things that could go wrong, only to wake up the next morning and realize none of them did? And look, that's not to say hard things don't happen, but when they do, have you ever said to yourself, thank goodness I spent the last six months worrying about this. I feel so much more prepared.
Have you? I don't think that's how it works. In fact, I think the opposite might be true. Every hour we spend mentally rehearsing a painful future is actually stealing something from the life you're living right now.
Because in that moment with the Instagram post, while my mind was imagining my husband having dementia, or wondering whether we'll ever really be able to retire, my actual life is happening, and I'm not even fully present for it. My boys are okay, my husband is healthy, I actually don't even want to retire right now, even if I had all the money in the world. In fact, as I was watching my mind respond to that Instagram post, there was nothing in that moment that required me to solve a problem.
The only thing my brain was solving was an imaginary future. Our brains are so incredibly convincing. They actually make imagined pain feel almost as real as actual pain.
These thoughts create very real emotions, and you feel them in your body. Your heart starts racing, your shoulders tense, your stomach drops. It's as if that terrible imagined future is already here.
Except it isn't. The hard truth is that there isn't some amount of worrying that's going to make me ready for the hard moments. There isn't actually a checklist that I can complete today that's going to make those experiences hurt less if they ever happen.
If anything, all I'm going to be doing is grieving twice, feeling that pain once in my imagination, and then potentially again if it ever actually happens. Rehearsing pain has never actually prevented pain. It's only stolen peace.
So worrying doesn't prepare us. But I think there's something that does. Because the antidote to worst-case scenario thinking isn't optimism.
It's not telling yourself everything is going to be fine. Because you don't actually know that. And honestly, your brain knows that you don't know that.
So just trying to think positively, to slap a happy thought on it, often doesn't work. Because our brains truly don't believe it. But what actually works, what I found makes the biggest impact on our peace, is learning to trust yourself.
And not trust that nothing bad will ever happen. That isn't a promise that any of us get. And it's not to trust that our kids will always make great decisions, or that our health will always be great, or that things will always turn out the way that we hope.
The kind of trust I'm talking about is actually much deeper. It's trusting that whatever happens, I will figure out the next step. I may not know today what I would do if one of my boys called me with terrible news.
I don't know how I would navigate it if my husband became seriously ill. I truly don't know exactly what I would do or how I would feel if one of my greatest fears came true. But here's what I do know.
I've made it through every hard thing my life has put in front of me so far. Certainly not perfectly, not without tears or struggle. But I have made it through.
And so have you, my friend. Think about your own life for a minute. There are things you have already survived that your younger self couldn't imagine surviving.
Relationships that ended. People you've buried. Dreams that changed.
Disappointments that took your breath away in a moment. Those times when you thought, I don't know how I'm going to get through this. And then somehow, you did.
And not because you worried about those things ahead of time, but because when the moment arrived, you became the woman who could handle it. Self-trust is simply a deep inner knowing that you can face what comes. Not because you've prepared for every possible outcome, but because you have evidence.
Evidence from your own life that you are someone who finds a way through. And I want to invite you to sit with that for a second, because I think we rush past it. We hear trust yourself, and it sounds nice, but it also sounds a little vague.
A little like something you'd see on a coffee mug. So let me try to make it more concrete. Self-trust, in the context of parenting big kids, doesn't mean trusting that you'll always say the right thing.
It doesn't mean trusting that you'll have all the answers when your kid calls you in a crisis. And it also doesn't even mean that you won't fall apart at times, or grieve, or struggle. It means trusting that even if you do fall apart, you will put yourself back together.
That even if you don't have all the answers in the moment, you will find them. That even in the hardest version of what's coming, the one your brain is so convinced is inevitable, you will not be incapable of facing it. This is very different than the way we tend to talk about trust.
We want to say to ourselves, I trust that everything is going to turn out okay. Instead, self-trust recognizes the reality of life, but it also says that something bad might happen, and I will still be okay. Maybe not immediately, maybe not easily, but eventually, fundamentally, I will be okay.
And here's what I find so interesting. The moms who seem to navigate this season of life with the most peace aren't necessarily the ones whose kids have figured everything out. They're not the ones whose lives are perfect.
Instead, they're the ones who have developed a deep, almost unshakable confidence in their own ability to handle what comes. So I want to really invite you to think about this for a second. If self-trust is available to us, if the evidence is actually already there in your life, why don't you feel it? What gets in the way? I think a big part of it is that we've been taught implicitly, and maybe even explicitly, that a good mom worries.
That worry is love. That if you really care about something, you think about it constantly. And if you stop worrying, it means you're letting them down.
That maybe you're not taking it seriously. Essentially, that you're not doing your job. I mean, think about what we say to each other, I can't help it, I'm a mom.
As if worrying is just part of the job description. And in a way, we wear it as a badge of how much we love our kids. The more I worry, the more I care.
But I want to gently push back on that, because I think worry and love are not the same thing. You can love your child completely, and still choose not to spend the next three hours imagining everything that could go wrong in their life. In fact, I'd argue that choosing to come back to the present, choosing to trust yourself and them, is actually a more generous form of love.
Because worry doesn't just cost you. It often costs the relationship. Because it leaks into how you talk to your kid.
The tension that they can feel even when you're trying to hide it. So we mistake worry for being prepared. We mistake anxiety for vigilance.
And we treat the voice that says what if it all goes wrong as the responsible voice, the one we should listen to. But it's not. That's just your primitive brain doing its job.
It isn't wisdom or love. It's just fear. And there's something else that gets in the way of self-trust.
And it's that we don't give ourselves credit for what we've already survived. We go through hard things, and we almost immediately forget that we overcame them. We don't stop and say, I did that.
I didn't know how I was going to get through it, and I got through it. Instead, we file it away as this bad experience we had. We want to sweep it under the rug, and then we immediately start scanning for the next thing that could go wrong.
I think about the things that I've navigated as a mom that I genuinely didn't know if I could handle at the time. There have been so many moments with my boys where I have thought, I do not know how to do this. I didn't have a roadmap.
I didn't have certainty. I just had to take the next step and trust that the next one would become visible. And my friend, it always did.
But here's what we do. We don't carry that with us. We don't think, look at the evidence.
Look at what we've already gotten through. Instead, the next hard thing comes along, and we start from zero, like we have no proof of our own resilience, like that history of everything we've overcome in the past doesn't even count. Does that sound familiar? I think so many of us do this.
We discount our own resilience and track record of overcoming the hard things. We say, well, that was different, or I had more support back then, or that situation was easier. We find every reason not to let our own history be evidence of our own capability.
And this is yet another thing that keeps us stuck in worry. Because if you don't trust yourself to handle what comes, then of course, you need to try to prepare for every possible outcome. Of course, you're going to keep running worst case scenarios, because the only alternative, trusting yourself, feels like wishful thinking.
But what if self-trust is simply the truth? Because you have already survived things that you didn't know that you could survive. And maybe that is the work, my friend, not eliminating the worry or fixing your fear, but learning to look back at your own life and actually see the woman who has always found a way through and choosing to trust her. So let's really take a step back here, because let's be honest, your primitive brain isn't going to stop doing its job tomorrow.
It's still going to offer you worst case scenarios and scary stories. Mine continues to do this. I've been doing this work for years, and my very human brain still hands me invitations to catastrophize.
The difference is you don't have to believe every story your mind tells you. One of the simplest things I've learned to do is pause and notice where my brain has gone. Has it left the reality of my life as it is right now and started creating stories about a future that doesn't exist yet? Because once I notice this, I have a choice.
I can keep following my brain down that rabbit hole, or I can ask myself, is there anything I actually need to do right now? If the answer is yes, by all means do it. Make that doctor's appointment. Have that conversation.
Set that boundary. But if the answer is no, if there's truly nothing to do right now except think about how bad it could be, then that's just rehearsing pain. And rehearsing pain has never prevented pain.
It only steals your peace. And when I really think about that, that's the part that makes me the saddest. Not that my brain offers me these stories.
It's just what our human brain does. What makes me sad is realizing how easy it is to miss the life that's actually happening while I'm busy worrying about the life that might never happen. Imagine having your son at home with you for one of the last summers you might ever have them home.
And instead of just enjoying them, you're monitoring what time they get out of bed or whether they make good enough use of their time. Or sitting across the table from someone you love, but instead of really seeing them, imagining the future pain they're going to bring you or what your life would be like without them. And meanwhile, they're sitting right in front of you.
We spend so much time trying to protect ourselves from tomorrow that we unintentionally rob ourselves of this moment right now. Because one day there will be hard things. There will be challenges that neither you or I can predict.
But I know for myself I don't want to look back on this season of my life and realize I spent it grieving things that hadn't happened yet. I don't want to miss my boys becoming the men they're becoming because I was so busy worrying about who they might become if everything went wrong. I don't want to miss the chance to walk on the beach with my husband right now because we're so busy working hard for some future when we can retire and walk on the beach.
What I actually want is this moment right now, even with all of its uncertainty and imperfection, because this moment right now is the only one I actually have. The only one I'm guaranteed. My friend, I truly believe that this is the work of midlife.
Not eliminating uncertainty or controlling our kids to guarantee their future, but becoming the kind of woman who can face uncertainty without losing herself to it. Someone who can love her family without living in constant fear. And someone who trusts herself enough to know that whatever comes, she will find a way through.
This is exactly the work we do in Mom 2.0. It's not just about being the mom you want to be for your growing kids. It's about learning to be the woman who trusts herself. The woman who can feel peace even when life isn't predictable.
Who doesn't need her kids to be okay in order for her to be okay. And if you want that kind of support, I'd love to invite you to explore Mom 2.0. The link with more information is in the show notes. My friend, the next time you catch your brain racing into some imagined future, I invite you not to judge yourself, but just smile.
Because you'll recognize that all that's happening is your primitive brain is trying to protect you. That's its job. And it's really good at it.
And as you notice this, maybe instead of following your mind down that rabbit hole, you can come back. Back to the dinner table. Back to the conversation you're having.
Back to the kid who's in front of you right now, still very much a work in progress. Possibly not quite where you'd hope they'd be, but in the process of becoming who they are. Could it be possible to be in all of the becoming, rather than afraid of all of the ways it could go wrong? In fact, can you come back to the beauty of your life right now in all of its imperfection, and remind yourself you've made it through everything so far.
And you'll make it through what comes next too. And my friend, maybe one day this will be a chapter you miss. My hope for both of us is that when we look back on this season of our lives, we won't remember it as the season we spent worrying about tomorrow.
We'll remember it as the season where we were fully here. And with that, I'm going to go take a walk on the 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.
