BE WHERE YOUR FEET ARE—PARENTING TEENS, THE EMPTY NEST, AND LETTING GO | EP. 275
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.
As our kids grow up, the time we get with them becomes more precious. And that can create enormous pressure to make every visit, vacation, and conversation meaningful.
We start reading our kids' moods, searching for reassurance, and worrying about what comes next. But in trying so hard not to lose the moment, we may be the ones missing it. In this episode, I'm sharing what it really means to let go, stay present, and experience the extraordinary privilege of witnessing your child become who they are. Let's dive in.
Hello, my friend. I'm on my way to Chicago right now to visit my son.
He's spending the summer there doing an internship before his senior year of college. We live on the East Coast, so getting to Chicago is a two-hour flight. Or about a 14-hour drive if you're feeling ambitious.
It's not around the corner, but it's not insurmountable either. He's been there all summer, and he's turning 21 at the end of the month. And it was pretty clear with me that he didn't want me there for his birthday weekend.
And I get it. Turning 21 is a big deal. He wants his friends to be there to celebrate with him.
So I'm going two weeks ahead of his birthday to see what his life is all about in Chicago. And even more, I want to give him a hug before he turns 21. Here's what's so interesting to me.
My boys are both in college now, and there's this whole stretch of their lives I don't get to experience day-to-day anymore. When your kids are living at home, you get to experience, or at least you perceive that you get to experience, so much of what they're going through. You might not actually know what their day-to-day life is like when they're at high school, but they come home.
And so you get these regular temperature checks. You can see them. And even if they don't talk to you, there's something about proximity that gives us a bit more comfort, a bit more of a sense of how they're doing.
One of my clients described this so well. She said, I need to see my kids. I need to be able to just see their faces and be near them.
And somehow that gives me greater reassurance that they're doing okay. All summer, I've been wondering about my son and how he's doing. He went to Chicago knowing no one.
He found an apartment to sublet on his own with three total strangers. And it wasn't at all clear whether he'd find his people in those first few weeks. He called home a lot.
I think in part because he was a little bored. And he said he felt a little lonely at times. We haven't heard as much from him over the past few weeks, so I'm hoping that that's a good sign.
I told him I wanted to come to a visit. And for me, there's something about just being a part of my boys' lives, getting to experience even just a sliver of their experience when they're far from home. There's something so rich about that.
It's not only a touchpoint for me, a chance to get to see them and read the signs on how they're doing. But for me, there's also something about having a visual about what their lives are like. Like, where are they living? Where do they go to work? What does their day-to-day experience look like? Because then it feels like when they call and tell me things, I can envision exactly what that means.
It feels like it leaves less to the imagination. Maybe it even gives me some comfort, just being able to have some certainty about what their experience is like. But I'll be honest, as much as I've been looking forward to this trip, there's so much running through my mind that I want to coach myself through right now.
Because what I really want this weekend is to be fully present with my son. And I'm guessing you can relate, that it's so easy not to be present. Our minds go in a hundred different directions.
There's so much anticipation, so much reading the signs that your kid gives you, trying to figure out if they're doing okay or if they're having a good time. And as I say all this, I realize how universal this experience is. Whether you're visiting your kid or you're on vacation with your family, anytime you're spending a concentrated amount of time with your kid that you really want to make the most of.
I had a client tell me recently about a fantastic trip she took with her family. And she shared with me that the entire time, her brain was scanning her kids for signs that they were enjoying the vacation, that they appreciated all the effort she put into it. She told me she caught herself watching her daughter's face during dinner one night, trying to figure out if she was really happy to be with them or if she was just annoyed.
She also found herself apologizing ahead of time. Maybe the plans were too boring or the accommodations weren't nice enough. She found herself checking in constantly.
Then at one point, her daughter said, Mom, the trip is great. Stop asking. It seemed the only person having a hard time on that vacation was her, because she'd spent the whole trip auditing everyone else's experience instead of just being present for her own.
Luckily, she'd been working with me long enough to catch her brain doing it. She noticed how easily her mind slipped into looking for reassurance, into feeling this urge to fix whatever her kid's experience was. Because this vacation was supposed to be fun, right? And it's so interesting that I can see my mind gravitating to the same worries.
I can already anticipate all the things that could happen this weekend. What I actually notice in myself is excitement mixed with some nervousness. I texted my son earlier in the week to confirm that I was still coming in today.
It took him two days to respond, but eventually he did text me back. And he wrote, Looking forward to it, Mom. Just text me when you get to the hotel, and I'll come meet you.
So yesterday, I texted him my hotel details. I told him I loved him, I couldn't wait to see him, and so far, I've gotten nothing back. On the one hand, this is par for the course.
My sons do not always text me back. And it's actually something I've just come to accept. But in any case, I haven't heard back.
And I'm on my way to Chicago. So I'm going to assume that when I land, I'm going to meet up with him. I mean, I do know where he lives, so I can just go to him.
I have no doubt I'm going to connect with my son today. But as you can imagine, I can already see my mind go to, Does he really want me to visit? Am I imposing? Maybe he's having such a good time that this feels like a drag. His dad actually ended up in Chicago on business a few weeks ago, and they got to spend a whole day together.
They walked the city already and did the architecture tour, all the classic touristy stuff. So part of me wonders if he's going to feel like he has to repeat that whole day now that I'm coming in separately. When I texted him yesterday, I said, Don't worry about entertaining me.
I'm just here to spend time with you. But you say that, and then you still look for reassurance. You want to hear back.
No, Mom, I'm really glad you're coming. It's interesting, at a certain point as your kids grow up, you stop getting concentrated periods of time with them. When they're little, they're with you all the time.
But as they get older, you lose the car rides, because now they're driving themselves. You don't even have dinner together every night because everyone's schedule is so full. They spend more time in their room.
So even when they're technically living under your roof, you're not actually spending all that much time together. And on vacation even, you're together, but you can also be apart. People take side adventures or somehow still spend a lot of time scrolling on their phones, even though you're in this great new place that's theoretically compelling enough to give you a reason to stop scrolling.
In terms of spending time together, when we've gone to visit our boys at college, it's usually been me and my husband together. So there's been the three of us to carry the conversation. In a way, at least in my mind, that's felt like less pressure.
But this weekend, it's just going to be me and my son. We haven't spent this much concentrated time together since a long car ride I've talked about on this podcast before. It was actually a long car ride home from Chicago, in fact, but it was at a time when he barely spoke to me the entire drive home.
My relationship with my son has completely transformed since that car ride. What he was going through at that time, he's moved through it. I can genuinely say I have my son back, this beautiful young man.
He has grown up so much and grown into himself in a way that I can't help but think the challenges he faced were part of helping him create. The dark times in his life that he's had to navigate, the ones I still wish I could have saved him from, they're a part of the strength and the wisdom he now has to apply to the journey of his life. There is so much I'd love to talk with this beautiful young man about.
Some topics are easy. I'll imagine he'll have a lot to share about his internship and his life in Chicago. He'll try to explain to me the work he's doing.
It's mechanical engineering, and I imagine a large part of the conversation going completely over my head. So there are some easy topics, or at least topics that I'm willing to do my best to understand. And then there are the ones he would love to broach, but you're not quite sure how.
You wonder if you should bring it up, or if by some miracle the conversation will naturally go there. You catch yourself anticipating getting something out of them, the chance to share your thoughts on something you feel they need to hear. Without really meaning to, you can approach these moments with a bit of an agenda.
And I can feel my own agenda for this weekend if I'm really honest with myself. There's a version of this trip in my head where we're walking along the river, and he really opens up to me, that he tells me how he's really navigated life in Chicago. Maybe he'll talk about his hopes and his fears for life after graduation, and maybe, somehow, we'll find a way to talk about that hard period in our relationship so many years ago.
I would love to hear what it was like from his perspective. Thinking about all these topics, I'll start with life after graduation. My son is heading into senior year with a lot to figure out.
His internship could turn into a return offer, but that would mean Chicago. And if they offer him a job, it sounds like he's only going to have a few weeks to decide. So suddenly there's this pressure, this significant decision looming.
And then my mind runs ahead. What if he takes this job in Chicago? He'll be starting his post-college life a plane ride away, when right now he's 90 minutes from us in Philadelphia, and even now we don't get to see him as often as I'd like. And that's partly my fault, but it's also part him being busy with his life, which is just how life goes.
You get caught up in what's happening, and before you know it, your kids are living a life that's genuinely separate from yours. And I have so many clients in the same boat, kids scattered across the country. You spend your whole life imagining you'll always be part of your kid's life, in whatever form that's supposed to take.
And then you hit the stage and realize how complicated that actually is. What if your kids end up in completely different places? Do you uproot your own life to be closer to them, only to find out they're not staying there either? It's wild how unpredictable it all is looking ahead. And here's what's fascinating.
Part of me doesn't want him to take a job in Chicago, but he's also considering going straight to grad school for a master's, and I have opinions about that too. We've set the boundary in our house that paying for grad school is on our boys, so it's not even really that I have opinions related to the cost of grad school. It's more the question of whether continuing grad school would put off opportunities he should be taking now.
Honestly, I have no idea what the right answer is. I don't know anything about mechanical engineering, or what kind of jobs are actually out there, or even what specific type of engineering my son wants to do. So my advice, in so many ways, is absolutely irrelevant.
But I can still feel that I have opinions. And I think that's worth being really honest about too. Because so many of us do this.
We confuse having a strong feeling about something with having useful information about it. I have a very strong feeling about my son not moving to Chicago. But the truth is, that feeling is about me.
It's about my own comfort, and my own picture of what I want the next 5 to 10 years to look like. But none of that has anything to do with what's right for my son's career. There's also so much about my relationship with my son.
Everything we've been through, together and apart, that feels like it deserves its own conversation. And yet, I don't want to force that either. In so many ways, everything he's been through is his journey.
And I was just a side player in it. The impact of his experience on me, though, was profound. Maybe there's a part of me that wants closure.
Or maybe I just want to hear, in his own words, what it was actually like. Because I don't know that we've ever had an honest conversation about it. When I look back on that whole chapter, I recognize how much it shaped my ability to grow into the mom I want to be for my boys.
At some point, I was going to have to learn how to let go. How to let them be who they need to be. How to love and support them while also holding boundaries for myself.
I wouldn't be anywhere near as confident and as at ease in my relationship with either of my boys today, if not for that difficult time. And look, I know it can be easy to hear me talk about this and think, well, she got her happy ending and her son came back around. And this is for sure true.
But even before that happened, I had to make a decision. I could either hold on and risk continuing to damage the relationship as I was doing, or I could figure out how and what to let go. My son was always going to go through what he was going to go through on his own timeline.
There was actually nothing I could do about that. So the work I had to do was mine. And it strikes me, for all of us moms, this stage of parenthood is such an opportunity to step into this next version of our relationship with our kids in a way that lets us actually be present in it.
And as I think about this weekend with my son, that's what I want. More than offering him advice or getting information. More even than the closure that would be nice to have someday.
None of that matters nearly as much as just being in the moment with my son. This journey reminds me of a time when my youngest went to a summer program in Eleuthera four years ago. The program had a saying, be where your feet are.
And they repeated that mantra all summer to remind the kids to stay in the moment of this extraordinary experience they were having. And I had the privilege of getting to fly down for family weekend. It was the last weekend of the program and I got to visit him and see what the program was all about and then bring him back home.
There was something about that trip. Maybe because I went alone and it took a bit of an adventure to get there. Eleuthera is a pretty remote island in the Bahamas.
When I landed, I had to drive an hour to get to the school in a rental car I picked up from some guy named James at the side of a remote road next to the airport, which was the size of a Dunkin Donuts. Everything about where I'd be staying and how it would all work out was totally up in the air until I literally got to my room. And then I remember getting there and it was so hot.
Just unbelievably hot. And I couldn't find water anywhere. I think it was actually a holiday, so even the small stores I'd passed on the drive down were closed.
So I was thirsty and I was hot and I remember lying on the bed under the fan trying desperately to cool down. And then there was a knock on the glass door. I looked up and there was my beautiful son.
I hadn't seen him in six weeks and he was only 16 at the time. He'd known I was there and he'd used my iPhone to track me down. And I was over the moon.
I jumped out of bed. I was jumping up and down to see him. I hugged him.
My heart just broke open. It was such a special trip. But I've heard that phrase so much that weekend, being where your feet are.
So maybe that's a part of why I remember that weekend so vividly. Because every time I heard that phrase, it was a reminder to just be present. What I loved most, in addition to just being with my son in that special place, was the privilege of witnessing his life.
Here he was in a brand new environment with a new group of kids he'd built real strong friendships with over six weeks. He was confident in a way that was new. He was only 16.
And I remember going to an ice cream stand and the poor woman running it was totally overwhelmed by the influx of kids and parents ordering these elaborate ice cream concoctions. And my son went behind the counter of this hut to help this woman scoop ice cream. And I remember thinking, this is such a good kid.
It was one of those moments when you see your kid doing something you hadn't witnessed them doing before. And you get this sense of awe and maybe a little gratitude thinking, somehow I must have done something right. It occurs to me that there were so many reasons that weekend that could have taken me out of the moment.
As I said, it was hot. And my neighbor found a tarantula in her room. My son also ended up breaking his toe on the beach when he snuck out one night.
And there were also so many moments during that weekend when my son chose to hang out with his friends rather than spend time with me. But if I had spent that weekend the way my brain wanted to, running my own agenda about what I needed from that reunion with my son, or looking for appreciation that I'd taken time out to travel to Eleuthera, or that we had funded this adventure, if I had gotten angry that my son was breaking rules and sneaking out, if I had allowed my mind to go down all these rabbit holes, I would have missed it. The beauty of my 16-year-old quietly deciding to help the elderly Bahamian woman scoop ice cream without being asked.
I would have missed really seeing my son in a new element. This kid, who'd had the same friends at the same school since he was three years old, had now made friends with kids from around the world. And not just friends, they seemed like family.
If I had spent the weekend competing for attention, I would have missed how my son was trying so hard to be in this moment, in the final days with a group of people he would never connect with in the same way again. If I had been focused on myself and what I needed, I would have missed how my son, the youngest of all the students in the program, was looked at as a leader. He grew up so much in those six weeks, and he learned from several mistakes, and I had the awe of having a front-row seat in the fleeting, special moments of his life.
Missing all of this is the cost of not being where your feet are. These are the moments in your life that you will never get back. And I'm not even talking about just the moments in the Bahamas, or the fun weekend in Chicago, or even on vacation.
I'm talking about the everyday, often mundane moments that make up the majority of your life. We so often miss these moments, because we're so caught up in our own head, worrying about the future, regretting the past, wishing things were different. It is such a gift to witness our kids becoming who they're meant to be, and it's so easy to miss it.
So easy to get caught up in what we want to say, in worrying about whether they want us there, or how they're engaged with us, in all the things we feel like we need to make sure they know, as if they don't already know. And all of this has been running through my head as I get to the airport. What I really want out of this weekend is to be where my feet are.
I want to take in the snapshot of my son, two weeks before his 21st birthday. A son on the brink of big decisions about the shape of his life. Decisions that I have no idea how they should actually go.
What I really want to remind myself is that it doesn't actually matter what I think. This is his life, his journey, and more than anything, what I want to keep is the privilege of being a witness to it. To be invited into my boys' lives at whatever stage they're in.
To be a witness, a cheerleader, to let them know how much I love them, and that whatever they choose, I'm rooting for them. I'm here. They're not doing it for me, but God is it a privilege to watch.
There are so many messy parts of raising kids. So much to worry about. Mistakes and fears and rejection.
Pieces of this that are genuinely painful and uncomfortable. And part of being where your feet are is learning how to sit with that discomfort without letting it steal the moment from you. So as I head into this weekend with my son, I am willing to be uncomfortable.
I'm willing to notice every thought about what I want to say, everything I'm worried about, and let those thoughts go. Because none of it matters as much as the fact that I get to spend the weekend with my son. And I want to be present for it.
My friend, if you're listening to this and realizing that your anxiety and frustration is stealing your ability to be present, I want to invite you to explore my Mom 2.0 coaching programs. The goal of this work is to empower you to separate your own peace of mind from your kids' choices and their moods and their outcomes, so you can actually show up the way you want to. The truth is, our anxiety, frustration, guilt, and hurt so often hold us back from truly showing up as the mom and the woman we want to be, both for our kids and for ourselves.
In this program, you'll learn how to take power back over your emotional well-being so that being this version of yourself, the one who's calm and present, loving and confident, is simply who you are and not someone you wish you could be. If you'd like to learn more about Mom 2.0, there's a link with more information in the show notes. My friend, wherever you are right now, on vacation with your family, far away from your kids, or on your way to see them, or maybe just thinking about the version of your child you're not sure how to reach anymore, be where your feet are.
Because this moment right now is the one that you have. The past is the past. The future isn't any more certain just because you have thoughts about it.
At this moment now, it's here for the taking, and what I choose is to show up and fully embrace all of it. The joy and the awe, the discomfort, the uncertainty, all of it. This is my life, and I choose to be here now.
Be where your feet are, 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.
