WHEN YOUR BIG KID'S LIFE TAKES A LEFT TURN—THE KIND OF GRIEF MOMS DON'T TALK ABOUT WHEN PARENTING TEENS AND NAVIGATING THE EMPTY NEST | EP. 281
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.
What do you do when your big kid's life suddenly takes a left turn? Maybe they're struggling in school, or making choices that scare you, they could be pulling away from you, or they suddenly just don't seem like the kid you thought you knew. Underneath all the worry and trying to figure out what to do, there might be something else happening inside of you that we don't talk about nearly enough in these situations, and that's the feeling of grief. In this episode, I'm talking about what we're really grieving when our kids struggle, and how to keep loving and supporting them without putting your own life on hold until they're okay. Let's dive in.
Hello, my friend.
You know, we talk a lot about wanting the best for our kids. We truly want to believe in them and their potential. We want them to be happy, we want them to be safe, we want them to take care of themselves, and we want to have a relationship with them where they still connect back with us, where they still want to tell us what's going on in their lives. And everywhere you look, you see examples of families that seem to have this locked in.
You see kids who seem happy, and motivated, and headed in a good direction. And you see moms who seem close to their kids and really connected with them. So when your own kid is struggling in one of these areas, when they're not taking care of themselves, or when they don't seem happy, or when they seem stuck, or like they're moving in the wrong direction, or when you're really struggling in your relationship with them, it can be so easy to feel like you must be doing something wrong.
I was talking to a client in one of my groups recently, and she said that everywhere you look in society, we get this message that if you just parent your kids well, that they'll turn out okay. And so if they're not okay, it's got to be you. It's got to be something that you're doing wrong.
And I think that message gets reinforced all the time because there's so much parenting advice everywhere. There are therapists and parenting experts telling us to set better boundaries, to communicate differently. We need to stop rescuing our kids, but listen more.
And we've got to hold our kids accountable. And look, it's not that this advice is necessarily wrong. There are always things that we can do differently as we approach parenting our kids.
But the reality is that sometimes what works with one kid doesn't work with another. And so there's also an art to applying the advice you get. And there truly is no one-size-fits-all solution.
But when your kid is really struggling, sometimes all of that advice starts to feel less like support and more like evidence, really like a judgment on how you've handled your role. When your kid is struggling or headed down the wrong path, you start to think that there must be something you haven't figured out yet, some better way you're supposed to talk to them, or some better boundary you're supposed to be setting. Because if you could just get it right, maybe they would be okay.
Maybe they'd start taking school more seriously, or they'd get a job, or they'd stop drinking so much, or stop vaping, start taking better care of themselves, and maybe they would talk to you again. And so as moms, we keep looking for the thing we're supposed to do. Because when your kid is struggling, doing nothing feels almost impossible.
We want to help. We want to fix it. We want to believe that if we just keep showing up and keep trying, eventually we're going to find the thing that helps turn them around.
But what happens when no matter what you try, you can't seem to steer your kid in a better direction? Or you can't seem to connect with them in the way that you want to? I want to offer that even in these situations, there is something really valuable that we can do. And I want to get to that. But before I do, there's something I want to address first.
Because when your life with your child doesn't look anything like the life you thought you were going to have with them, we can feel this incredibly deep sense of disappointment in that. And sometimes, if we're really honest about it, that disappointment can feel a lot like grief. I remember a period in my own life when I experienced exactly this in my relationship with my son.
Up until a certain point, he and I had been incredibly close. Not only that, but he was headed down a path that, if I'm really honest, made me feel so proud. He was motivated and driven and doing really well.
And I could just see his future. It felt so full of potential. And I knew even at the time that that was all him.
I didn't actually take credit for his motivation or his intellectual curiosity. It just seemed to be the way he was wired. But I also remember taking a certain amount of personal pride in it.
I mean, I was just so proud. And although I couldn't take credit for it, I had also spent years nurturing this kid and supporting him and cheering him on. And when you see your child thriving, it can be hard not to feel a little bit like, wow, maybe I did something right here.
I had this picture in my mind of where he was headed. I could see him going to a great college. I could see him being successful and creating this brilliant, beautiful life.
But then we hit a really dark time in our relationship. He suddenly seemed ambivalent about so many of the things that had mattered to him before. He wasn't taking school as seriously.
And he was totally closed off to us. In fact, he seemed to be angry at us almost all of the time. At one point, we were having a conversation and I was asking him about something he had to do to get ready for his college applications.
And he said, Mom, I don't even know if I want to go to college. I remember thinking, wait, what? What is happening? It felt like the entire trajectory of what I thought his life was supposed to look like was changing right in front of me. And look, I know college is not the only path to success.
That really isn't the point. If he had come to me and said, Mom, I've thought about this and I want something different for my life, that would be one thing. I might have had to adjust my expectations, but I absolutely could have adjusted.
What was so hard was that this didn't feel like a young man thoughtfully choosing a different path. It felt like he was disconnecting from himself. He seemed ambivalent about school, about his future, and he seemed totally disconnected from us.
And I had suspicions that there was something more going on underneath all of it, but he wasn't talking to me about it. And so as his mom, all of this felt so wrong. It felt like I was watching this kid I thought I knew grow further and further away from himself, and I had no idea how to reach him.
And I hear versions of this from moms all the time. Maybe you're a kid spent their entire high school career working toward playing a sport in college, and suddenly they don't seem to care about it at all anymore. Maybe they were incredibly social and involved and had this great group of friends, and then all of a sudden they start pulling away from everyone and hanging out with a group of people that seem to have totally different, maybe even a dark set of interests and activities they're involved in.
Maybe your kid was an okay student before, but now they're failing classes and they don't seem particularly concerned about it. Or maybe it's something much bigger. Maybe they're doing drugs or they can't keep a job.
They're not taking care of themselves at all. Maybe they're making dangerous choices. Sometimes it feels like your kid just took a hard left turn.
And what makes that so hard is that you're still standing there holding this picture of where you thought they were going. Not necessarily because you decided what their life had to look like, but because you'd been watching them grow into something. You'd seen their potential and what you thought they were capable of, maybe what lit them up.
And of course, then you did what moms do. You nurtured those talents and interests. You signed them up for the sport.
You drove them to practice. You also paid for the lessons and went to the performances. You helped them get into that program they were really interested in.
You invested time and money and energy because you saw something in your kid and thought, this matters to them. This is part of who they're becoming. Most of us didn't sit around when our kids were little deciding, my child has to become a D1 athlete, or my kid has to go to an Ivy League school, or even that my kid has to have this certain kind of career.
It's usually much more organic and less specific than that. We see something in our kid, and because we love them, we help nurture that potential. So when they suddenly seem to turn away from all of it, it can be incredibly disorienting, especially when that left turn doesn't look like, I thought I wanted to be a doctor, but I actually want to be a lawyer.
It's not like we can't pivot. But it's much harder when that pivot looks like they're moving in the wrong direction, when it doesn't look like they're choosing a different dream, but like they're losing interest in having one at all. The truth is, the feeling that that can bring up in us is disappointment that feels a lot like grief.
And I actually think there are a few different layers to this, a few different kinds of losses. The first is the loss of your own sense of peace. There is something incredibly comforting about watching your kid move through life and feeling like, okay, they're okay.
They're going to be okay. Maybe everything isn't perfect. And of course you have the normal struggles, but they seem basically pointed in a good direction.
And I don't think we tend to appreciate how much peace we get from that reality until it's gone. Because when your kid is struggling, that sense of peace can feel like it disappears almost overnight. And then you wake up thinking about them and you go to bed thinking about them.
Your phone rings late at night and your stomach drops. You see their name come up on your phone and you wonder what now? It's like you're panicked before you even hear their voice. You can also be out to dinner or sitting at work or doing something completely unrelated to your kid, but some part of your brain is still working on the problem of them.
And over time, it is exhausting. So we feel this loss of the ease we used to have in our life. A loss of the joy of simply watching your child become who they're becoming.
Even the pride you used to feel can become complicated. Because now when you think about who they were a few years ago, or what they used to care about, you can feel this ache underneath it. You miss the feeling of looking at your kid and thinking, they've got this, they're on their way.
Another layer of this loss, especially after you've been trying unsuccessfully for a really long time to get your kid back on track, is that you can feel a loss of hope. I was talking to a mom recently whose son has been struggling for years, and I said to her, what if I could give you a crystal ball and tell you that five years from now, he's out on his own, he's got a job, he's supporting himself, and he's okay. She looked at me and she said, it's going to take five years? I mean, this mom had already spent years worrying and trying and encouraging and helping her son, and she's been wondering the whole time when he's finally going to get some traction in his life.
So the thought that she might still be carrying all of this five years from now, it felt overwhelming. She felt like that only solidified how little hope she was holding onto. You start to lose the belief that this is ever going to turn around.
I mean, you want to believe in your kid, and even in the worst of it, you may still even believe in who they are and what they're capable of. But when you've watched them struggle for a really long time, there can also be this voice in your head that says, what if this never changes? What if this is their life? And also, what if this is our life? So one layer of grief is the loss of ease and hope you used to feel in your life. The second kind of grief we can experience is the loss of the relationship you thought you were going to have with your child.
For me, this may have been the hardest part. My son and I had been so close, and during that dark period, it felt like that closeness had been ripped away from me. Here was this person I loved more than anything, and suddenly, I couldn't reach him.
I didn't know what he was thinking. I didn't know what was going on with him. And in a lot of ways, he didn't seem to want me to know.
And I also hear this story from moms all the time. My daughter used to tell me everything, or my son and I used to be so close. She used to want to spend time with us.
But now, you get one word answers, or they don't call at all. Every conversation seems to turn into an argument. You start feeling like you're walking on eggshells.
And this is a loss. Even if your child is right in front of you, you can be grieving the version of the relationship that you used to have. And then there's a third kind of grief that I think we talk about even less, because it can feel incredibly selfish to admit when your kid is the one who's struggling.
But this is the grief of having lost yourself. Because when your kid is struggling, it can start to take over your life. You may still go to work or meet a friend for lunch.
You still do all the things. But mentally and emotionally, so much of you is somewhere else, because you're always thinking about your kid. You're wondering what they're doing, if they're okay.
You're replaying that last conversation you had in your head, trying to figure out what you should say the next time they call. You're researching solutions. You're problem-solving.
You're constantly checking your phone to see if they've texted back, maybe waiting for the other shoe to drop. And without even realizing it, your life starts organizing itself around their struggle. This is especially painful at this stage of motherhood, because for so many of us, this was supposed to be the chapter where there was finally going to be a little more room for us.
Our kids are getting older. They're becoming more independent. Maybe we'd imagined having more freedom, more time with friends or our spouse, traveling, figuring out what we wanted to do for a change.
And then your kids start struggling, and instead of your world opening up, it can feel like it gets considerably smaller. You may technically have more time than you used to, but you don't feel free. You don't feel excited about what comes next because there's this huge part of your heart that's still tethered to your kid and what they're going through.
I had a client say something to me recently that captured this so well. A few years ago, she had been having a hard time making the transition to the empty nest. She was worried about the quiet, and she was trying to figure out what she was going to do with herself once her kids were out of the house.
And then fast forward a few years. Now her son is out on his own, but he's struggling. And she said to me, almost laughing at the irony of it, I miss when all I had to worry about was what I was going to do with my day.
Because now she's finally at the point where she's embraced the freedom she'd once been afraid of, but she's finding she can't enjoy it as much as she wants to because her son's struggle has moved right into that empty space. And I think this happens to so many of us moms. We put our own life on hold without ever making a conscious decision to do it.
We tell ourselves, I'll relax when he's doing better, or I'll focus on myself once she gets through this. I'll think about what I want when I know my kid is okay. But what if they're not okay for a while? What if this takes six months? Or two years? What if it takes five years? Do you stop living until they figure out their life? And I want to be really careful here because I'm not saying you should somehow detach from your child's pain or stop caring about what happens to them.
Of course you care, and of course their struggle affects you. But there is a difference between loving your child through a difficult time of their life and disappearing into that challenge with them. And before we figure out how to do this, I think it's really important to acknowledge the grief of all of this.
You miss the version of yourself who laughed more easily. The version of you who could get excited about something without immediately feeling guilty because your kid is struggling. You miss being able to go away for a weekend without spending half of it checking your phone.
Sometimes when our kids take a hard left turn, we don't just become afraid of where they're going. We start dreading where we're headed too. And that's part of the loss I want to invite you to acknowledge.
It is so valid to feel grief for the peace, the ease, and the hope that you used to have. Grief for the relationship you used to have with your kid. And grief for the version of yourself and the life you thought you were going to be living that seems to have been consumed by all of this.
Here's the thing. I don't think we typically acknowledge this kind of grief inside of ourselves. Instead, we just push past it because we focus on what to do about our kid.
But here's the problem with that. When you don't acknowledge what all of this is costing you, that pain doesn't just disappear. In fact, it just comes out somewhere else.
It comes out in the way you obsess about what your kid is doing, or in the way you try to control things that aren't actually in your power to control. It also comes out in the way you keep putting your own life on hold because somewhere in your mind you've decided that you're not allowed to be okay until they are okay. And this is where we can get really stuck.
Because now you're not only dealing with the reality that your kid is struggling, you're also carrying the weight of the fear and the disappointment and the grief about what their struggle means. What it means about their future, what it means about your relationship, and what it means about you as a mom. And the more tightly you hold on to all of that without acknowledging it, the harder it becomes to actually see clearly what is yours to do and what isn't.
So how do we work through this? I don't think the answer is to convince yourself that you shouldn't be sad, or to tell yourself to detach and stop caring. And you don't have to somehow become okay with choices that your kid is making that genuinely worry you. I think the first step is just telling yourself the truth.
This is hard. This is not the relationship I thought I would have right now. This is not the life I imagined for my kid.
And this is also not the way I thought this chapter of my own life was going to feel. And I need to make space to grieve all of this. There is something incredibly powerful about naming all of this without immediately trying to make it go away.
Because once you can separate the grief you're carrying from the problem you're trying to solve with your kid, you create a little more space. Space to acknowledge the reality of where you are and all of the thoughts you're caring about what you're making that mean. And when you can separate this as your work from how you want to support your child, you can begin asking a different question.
Not, how do I make my kid change and get better, move in the right direction? But how do I want to show up while my kid is figuring out their life? And these are really big questions we have to be very intentional about answering. How do you love your kid without disappearing into their struggle? How do you support them without taking responsibility for every choice they make? How do you set boundaries acknowledging that boundaries actually don't force that other person to change? And how do you keep living your life even when every part of you wishes that theirs look different? That is hard work. And no one has ever taught us how to ask or answer these questions.
But it is a huge part of the work we do inside of Mom 2.0 Collective. Because sometimes what you need isn't another article telling you what boundary to set or another list of things you should say to your teen or adult kid. Sometimes you just need a place to bring the fear and the disappointment and the anger, the guilt and the grief, all of the things that you're caring, and learn how to move through them without letting them consume you.
The work is figuring out what is actually in your power to do and how to support yourself in the process of watching your kid navigate what you can't do for them. Mom 2.0 is a place where you can talk honestly about the things that are hard to say out loud. Because your kid may be taking a hard left turn, but the work is deciding who you want to be in the face of that.
You can learn more about Mom 2.0 Collective in the show notes. My friend, if you're in this right now, if your kid is struggling and you feel that you've been holding your breath, I just want you to know that you don't have to wait for them to be okay before you find your strength again. And I know that that can sound almost impossible when you love your kid this much.
I know there's a part of you that thinks, how could I possibly let go when they're struggling like this? But my friend, your suffering does not save them. And your constant worry does not create their motivation or protect them from every bad decision. And putting your own life on hold also does not guarantee that they will find their way any faster.
This is the work. Learning how to find peace without needing everything to be fixed first. It's learning how to hold on to hope without pretending that everything is just going to turn out okay.
It's also staying connected to your kid without making their choices the measure of your relationship. And maybe most of all, having the strength to stay connected to yourself even in a season of life that feels impossible. Maybe where we're really trying to get to isn't a place where everything is okay, but a place where you are okay enough to keep loving your kid without losing yourself in the process.
My friend, you have more power than you think. 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.
