“I DON'T KNOW WHO I AM ANYMORE”—THOUGHTS MOMS PARENTING TEENS AND ADULT KIDS ARE ASHAMED THEY THINK | EP. 284
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.
The other day, I was talking to a client, and she told me how she hates when her husband comes home and asks, so what did you do today? The thing is, for years, she had an answer without even having to think about it. There were school pickups and practices, projects she had to help her kids with, doctor's appointments, groceries, and dinners. She had a never-ending list of responsibilities that she frankly didn't need to report out about.
It felt like it was clear that she had an important role to play in the family, and if her husband asked her about it, frankly, she couldn't even remember. But now, when he asks about her day, it feels like a judgment, because she doesn't have anything particular to report. Sure, she's keeping busy.
She goes to work out almost every day, and sometimes she meets a friend for lunch. She's considering getting involved in a variety of things. But somehow, now, to admit that this is how she's spent her day, even to her own ears, it feels like it's not enough.
She told me every day she feels like answering him, I don't know, I did nothing, I'm a loser. And she even acknowledged to me that she doesn't even think her husband really cares what she does. He's not asking to be critical.
He's just asking a normal question, the way people who love each other ask and check in on each other's day. The problem wasn't actually the question. It was how this mom was answering it in her own mind.
Motherhood brings with it such a sense of purpose. You honestly don't have to look for things to do. Your day is essentially dedicated to keeping your kids moving in the right direction.
Every day, they need to be fed and clothed. You need to make sure they get to where they need to go. You check in on their homework and their tests.
You support them, cheer them on, cheer them up. The work is honestly never done, until one day, it is. Except for it's not even a hard stop.
The work just slowly eases up. Suddenly, your kid stops telling you as much, or they spend more time in their rooms, more time out with friends. Suddenly, they're driving, and you don't even need to worry about drop-offs or pickups.
And eventually, they leave, and you don't have to worry about stocking the fridge or making dinner for anyone other than yourself, and maybe your husband. So this transition brings with it an uncomfortable series of emotions that feel difficult to face. Because for so long, your role and your purpose was so clear.
But then you get to the point where the clarity of that role becomes murky. Maybe even where the role itself feels like it's a thing of the past. And you can start to have this thought, I don't know who I am anymore.
Have you ever had this thought? Maybe it came up for you the week your youngest left for college. Maybe it came up for you sooner than that. The year your kid started pulling away, needing you less.
Maybe you're not even quite there yet, but you can feel it coming. You see how quickly your kids are growing up, and you're already panicking a little bit inside, thinking, what happens when they leave? So if you've ever had some version of this thought, that I don't know who I am anymore, I want you to know that there is nothing wrong with you, and you are absolutely not alone. I hear a version of this thought every week from moms who have dedicated their life to raising their kids and supporting their families.
They have done the work of heroes. And still, this thought finds them when they're standing in the quiet of their kitchen, contemplating what comes next. Maybe this thought for you isn't as blunt as, I don't know who I am.
There are actually a few different related thoughts that I hear from moms all the time, and I want to go through each, because it's possible that at least one of these is going to sound familiar. One related thought is, who am I if I'm not needed? I've had clients tell me about how their kids are at college or have moved away. For years, they thrived in a world where they were the one their kids turned to.
They helped them through challenges and supported them through every goal they set for themselves. And there's something so validating about being the one your child needs. I'm not going to lie, I've felt that way myself so many times.
There's something about having your kid come to you, especially when they're a little older. It's like, oh, they still need me. They value the role I can play in their lives.
And when that changes, moms have said to me, I just miss being needed. And so I ask them, who are you if you're not needed? And the answers I get back are surprisingly harsh. Here are some of the words moms have used to answer this question.
Moms will tell me, I'm someone without any skills. I'm someone who doesn't really matter to anyone anymore. I'm someone who spent 20 years building a life around people who don't need that life anymore.
I'm irrelevant. I'm someone with nothing to offer. I'm just an old woman with too much time on her hands.
I'm somebody nobody would miss if I disappeared for a week. My friend, these are actual words women have said to me. Just sit with those answers for a second.
These moms didn't say, I'm a woman with more time on her hands or a woman starting a new chapter of her life. These moms described themselves as someone who is irrelevant, unnecessary, someone who doesn't matter, as if her value expired the moment her kids stopped needing her in the way that they used to. And I want to be clear that I don't think being needed or even loving being needed is the problem.
But just notice how in these moms' words, what they're conveying is that in their minds, the ways they were needed translated into their value as a human being. The second thought that often comes up for us related to us not knowing who we are anymore is a thought along the lines of the best days of my life are behind me. I've had clients tell me about picking up something new, maybe a class or a hobby, something they've wanted to try for years.
And instead of feeling lit up by it, they get stuck on questions like, why am I even doing this? What's the end goal? It's not that they're short on things to do. They've signed up for the class and they've got a calendar full of actual activities. But what's missing is a thought that makes any of these feel like they matter.
And here's what I hear underneath all of this. What's really going on is that in their hearts, they truly believe that being a mom was the most important thing that they could ever do. Not one important thing among many others, but the thing, the role that gave every other role its meaning.
And here's the thing, I think being a mom is one of the most important things I have ever done as well. But believing it's the only thing, that nothing else could ever matter. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because if that's the belief, then nothing else is really ever going to measure up.
Another thought related to thinking that you're not sure who you are anymore is I feel like I have to justify how I spend my day. I've actually had a number of clients share this same pain point. Maybe it's their husband, maybe it's their kids.
They ask mom, what have you been up to? And it can feel incredibly uncomfortable to feel like they don't have a good answer. The truth is many of us equate productivity and purpose with value. And so somehow if a day doesn't have some quantifiable output, that it's not enough, that it's not valuable.
Here's the thing I notice about all of the women who come to me struggling with some version of these thoughts. I don't know who I am anymore. I don't know what to do now that I'm not needed.
The best days of my life are behind me and I have to do something to prove that I'm valuable. The thing is, none of these women are lazy. And in fact, none of them are lost for things to do.
Every one of them has a full life available to them. Their real challenge is the story in their minds that keeps them from believing that any of those options are enough. Now, if I asked any one of those women directly, do you really believe that you are not enough? Most of them would say, no, of course I'm enough.
But it would come out with a bit of hesitation. The kind that says, I know that's the answer I'm supposed to give. Of course I'm enough.
But it's not the one I really believe in my heart. Because actually believing I don't think I'm enough out loud feels somehow unbearable. Like something you're not allowed to admit even to yourself.
So instead, we push these thoughts down and try to cover them up with more busyness. Here's what I've noticed from coaching so many moms through this. It actually makes so much sense that these thoughts come up for us at this stage of motherhood.
Think about how the first half of your adult life was mapped out. You finished high school. Maybe you went to college.
You got married, settled into a home. You had kids. You raised those kids.
The order might have looked different for you and there might have been surprises along the way. But by and large, there was a roadmap. There was a plan you felt like you could follow to generally know that you were on some kind of path moving in the right direction.
And for the past 20 years, that roadmap has been organized around your kids. Their schedule became your schedule and their needs defined your to-do list. You didn't have to invent a purpose every morning because the purpose walked downstairs and asked for breakfast and needed a ride to school.
But at this stage of motherhood, when your kid is growing up and leaving the nest, it can feel like the predefined roadmap drops off a cliff into the abyss. The territory ahead feels completely uncharted. Literally 50 years of your life have been pre-planned and now, there's nothing in particular you're supposed to be doing next.
And for so many of us standing at the edge of that roadmap without a plan, it is genuinely disorienting. And my friend, that's not because you're doing something wrong. As humans, we like to have certainty.
And there is absolutely nothing certain about standing in front of a whole lot of question marks about what's ahead. Is it really any wonder we have some version of the thought, I don't know who I am anymore. But what's often happening is that we're falling into the identity trap.
And that's essentially when the role you're playing and the person you are stop feeling like two separate things. Think about any other role in your life, any jobs you've had or friendships you've been engaged in, hobbies you've had. Even when these roles have taken up a lot of your emotional or mental energy, they're still just roles.
And you recognize the difference between what I do and who I am. You know that you have an identity that exists outside of those roles and activities. But motherhood, especially in those years when your kids really needed you every day, doesn't feel like it works that way.
For one thing, the job is 24-7. There often isn't much space for a separate identity. So over time, that role and your identity can feel like it molds together.
You stop being someone who happens to be doing the job of raising kids and you become a mom, full stop. And it's not just that the role is all-consuming. It's that the role is also so deeply validating.
Someone needs you every single day in a way that's impossible to ignore. Your kid can't get dressed without you. They can't get to school without you.
And later, maybe they can't get through a hard week at school or a breakup or through a difficult challenge without calling you first. That's a level of being needed most of us will never experience in any other part of our lives. Not in a marriage, not in a friendship, not even in most jobs.
So the role doesn't just take up all the space. It also feels good to have it take up all the space. Being needed like that is one of the most validating experiences a person can have.
It answers a question most of us are asking our whole lives. Do I matter? Am I necessary? Would someone notice if I weren't here? And being a mom gives us positive answers to those questions every single day. That's what makes this identity trap so sticky.
It's not just that motherhood merged with your identity because it was constant. It's that the merging felt wonderful. It's not like your identity got wrapped up in a role you resented most days anyway.
By and large, your identity became fused with a role that made you feel more essential than almost anything ever has. So of course, it feels hard to let go. You're not just losing a role.
You're losing the clearest, most reliable source of believing that you matter, that you have ever had. So truly, this change can feel catastrophic in some ways. You're being asked for maybe the first time in 20 years to answer the question of who you are without the role doing it for you automatically.
And that is genuinely new work. My friend, I know it can feel like building a new identity when you feel exhausted and sad and overwhelmed. It can feel like such a heavy lift.
But I want to offer that there's also a cost of staying stuck in this trap and not doing this work. Because what happens if you don't break free of this trap is that you keep trying to outrun the feelings. You fill your calendar with a lot of stuff to try to avoid the quiet.
You feel resentful to your family when they ask about your day. Or you make half-hearted attempts to try new things, all the while telling yourself that it's a waste of time, that you don't have what it takes, or that it's not really going to fulfill you anyway. But on top of all of this, there's also a cost to your relationship with your kid as well.
Because when your entire sense of self is still dependent on being needed, then you start needing your kid to give you your sense of self. I hear it when moms tell me how hurt they feel when their kids don't call. Or how they feel upset that their kid is always busy and doesn't have time for them anymore.
How sometimes they try to insert themselves into their kid's life because it feels so good to be needed again. And I say all of this with so much love because I've done the same things myself. Sometimes it does hurt when your kid doesn't call.
And I also at times insert myself into my boy's lives even when they don't ask for help. None of that makes us bad moms. But if we're not careful, this can put pressure on the relationship we have with our kids.
Because they feel the pressure that says I need something from you in order for me to feel whole. And if we're not careful, what that conveys to them is that they are doing something wrong by living their own life. The irony is this is everything we've been working so hard to accomplish.
Our kids have grown up. They're independent. They don't need us in the same way that they used to.
And yet somehow there are times when that doesn't feel like success. It just feels like loss. So how do we break free from this trap? Here's the question I want to invite you to sit with.
What is it that being needed by your kids actually gave you? And sometimes the answer to that question feels obvious. But for each of us, it's actually very nuanced and different. So I want to give you a few examples of what I mean.
Maybe you would say to me that being needed gave you a sense of purpose. But I want to ask you to go one step deeper. What does that actually mean to you? Was it simply that your day had structure? Or is there more to it? Was it a sense of fulfillment that you ended each day believing you'd contributed something meaningful? Or was it a sense of accomplishment? Maybe some days the sense of accomplishment was as simple as getting everyone fed and where they needed to be.
But maybe other days it looked like being the reason a hard day got a little bit easier for someone you love. Whatever shape it took for you, purpose wasn't really about the tasks themselves. It was actually belief that your effort was accomplishing something.
That it mattered that you showed up. Maybe you would tell me that being needed by your kids gave you a sense of validation. And if that's true, I want to invite you to get even more specific about what that means for you here too.
Because validation isn't just one feeling either. Maybe you loved the validation of being chosen. That out of everyone your kid could go to, they came to you first.
Maybe it was the validation of being good at something. That you knew how to handle a crisis or manage a busy household. And you got to prove that to yourself over and over.
Or maybe it was the validation of being seen. Someone noticing you were there. That you were trying and that you were important to them.
Or maybe being needed by your kid gave you a sense of certainty. It made you feel like you knew what to do every day. There was no questioning yourself.
And sometimes there's actually a sense of relief in knowing exactly what's required of you. Maybe it also gave you a sense of certainty about what the immediate future looked like. You knew what grade your kid would be in next.
There might have been a sense of ease and knowing that life would keep going in a predictable way. Maybe being needed by your kid gave you a feeling of control. And I don't mean this in a negative sense.
I mean control in the sense that you could see a problem and actually do something about it. Your kid was struggling and you had a role to play in fixing it. This is a kind of power we actually don't get in many places in life.
And it can give us a sense of feeling empowered in ways that are very comforting and safe. Or maybe more than any of these, being needed gave you a feeling of connection. A version of love that felt easy and uncomplicated.
You didn't even have to ask for it. It was just built into the relationship. Your kid loves you and you love them, period.
Now here's what I really want you to hear. Your kid needing you didn't actually give you any of this. Not the purpose, not the validation, not the certainty, not the control, not even the connection.
What your kid gave you was an occasion. A really obvious, really undeniable occasion to believe something good about yourself. And you believed it.
Those beliefs are what created those feelings. Not the carpools or the crisis you talked your kid through. These feelings of validation and purpose, all of them, came from your beliefs about yourself and your role.
If the feeling was purpose, that belief might have been something like, what I'm doing is meaningful and important. If it was a feeling of validation, it was something along the lines of, I'm good at this. Or I'm the one they're choosing.
If it was certainty, maybe it was, I know exactly what today requires of me. Or if it was control, maybe it was, I can actually do something about this. None of these beliefs belong to your kid.
They were always yours. Your kid just made them impossible to doubt. Which means none of these beliefs about you are gone.
They're just waiting for you to give yourself permission to believe them again. And my friend, I can already hear you pushing back. You're probably thinking, but how can I think those things if my kid genuinely doesn't need me anymore? The reason I believed them was because they did.
And I hear you. You're probably right that your kid doesn't need you in the same way anymore. But that fact is about your kid.
It's not actually about you. Your kid growing up and needing you less doesn't prove anything about who you are. It only proves that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing at this age.
Here's the mistake your brain is making. For 20 years, being needed was the evidence that told you who you were. So the moment that evidence stopped showing up, your brain assumed the answer had disappeared too.
So you tell yourself, I don't know who I am anymore. But think back to when your kids were babies. You didn't know who you were as a mother either yet.
There was no evidence of you being a mom. You had no experience. You just started acting like a mom.
You showed up to this role every single day, learning and figuring things out. Sometimes you got things wrong and then you tried again. And somewhere along the way, you started believing in your identity as a mom.
My friend, you can do the exact same thing right now. You don't need to know exactly who you're becoming before you begin. You don't need a five-year plan.
You don't need to discover some hidden passion or come up with some brand new purpose for your life. You actually can start much smaller than that. You can just start to decide, how do I want to feel? What do I care about? What do I want to learn? What do I want to create? How do I want to take care of myself? My friend, start exploring these questions and then start showing up as this version of yourself.
Not because you have proof or evidence that this is who you are, but because this is how identity is built. You create the evidence of the version of yourself who you want to be. My friend, if you really think about it, this is exactly what your kids are doing right now as they build their own life.
They have no experience, no evidence that they can do it. They're just asking themselves simple questions about who they want to be. And they're taking small steps every day to create that reality for themselves.
What if you could do that same thing? My friend, your kid growing up does not mean the most meaningful part of your life is over. It only means that the part where your life was largely defined for you is changing. And now, maybe for the first time in a very long time, you get to define it.
This is exactly the work we do inside Mom 2.0. Mom 2.0 is my coaching program for moms who know something is changing in their relationship with their kids, maybe in their role as a mom, and often in the ways they see themselves. Through this work, you learn to empower yourself to figure out how you want to show up in this next stage of motherhood. So if you're ready for help in doing that, you can learn more about Mom 2.0 through the link in the show notes.
My friend, if there's a part of you saying to yourself, I don't know who I am anymore, maybe the only thing that's happened is that you are no longer being handed the definition. For years, motherhood answered that question for you. Now you get to answer it for yourself, and maybe you don't know the answer yet, and that's okay.
So instead of just asking the rhetorical question, who am I now? Try asking, who do I want to become next? And open your heart to the possibility that maybe this version of myself is possible. 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.
