Navigating Life and Relationships with Adult Children
The Inevitability of Time
It’s hard to imagine, when your children are still young and so dependent on you, that one day you’ll be learning that life and relationships with adult children is much the same, but also totally different as a mother.
By the time they’ve started school, the life you had before their arrival is a distant memory.
An autumn sunrise filtering light across our frost-covered lawn.
You’re well established in the daily, hourly, each minute of every day mothering gig.
You wonder what it will be like to have them grown enough that you’re not constantly telling them all the things that seem so endlessly redundant.
The Daily Mantras of Mothering
don’t talk with food in your mouth
close your mouth when you chew
say please
say thank you
Did you brush your teeth? Let me see/smell… go do it again, this time the way you know how.
hang up your coat
pick up your toys
no, you can’t have a cookie, it’s almost dinnertime.
The Subtle Shifts of Growing Up
Amid all this mothering, you can’t imagine a day when it will cease to be.
Mothering is an experience in which the days are long but the time is short.
You’re so busy doing, doing and doing more that you scarcely notice time passing. And yet, it does. It relentlessly unapologetically marches forward.
You notice only that the jeans you bought six months before are now high water and the shoes you bought three months ago no longer fit.
Then, one day, with seemingly no warning, you wake up to a family that is all grown up.
Echoes from Childhood
As you sit in your living room, you’re kept company by lanky, but grown bodies which are both familiar yet oddly unfamiliar.
If you listen closely, faint echoes of childhood laughter can still be heard. Whispers from a past that seems like yesterday, but also a lifetime ago.
You feel off kilter.
The Transformation of Home
Where is that boy who used to bounce into the house and sing out “Hey, everyone, I’mmmmm hooommme!”
And where did the girl, who used to sit at your kitchen table surrounded by all her art stuff, go?
When did the child who left trails of clothing from one end of the house to the other disappear?
And when did you stop looking out the window every few minutes to make sure all were present and accounted for during their many backyard adventures?
The bi-weekly batches of chocolate chip cookies no longer become necessary? The washing machine no longer run 24/7 and every light in the house no longer stay on, especially when no one was using them?
These days, you go to the freezer hoping to find some ice cream, and lo-and-behold, there actually is some.
Reflecting on Motherhood’s Battles and Blessings
And each of these things stabs at the center of your soul.
You look around at the full grown bodies now sitting where your babies once sat. Occasionally you catch a faint glimpse of those yesteryear children. A turn of the head, an unexpected giggle, the verbal jab lobbed at a sibling.
And it’s comforting.
Even though you’ve never experienced war, you can imagine this is what it’s like to survive a rigorous and prolonged battle where the intensity and chaos seems like an unrelenting hurricane.
The Silence After the Storm
Your mothering years flew by in such a busy blur.
For years, where you’re now sitting in silence, there was an almost constant cacophony of noise. And in the particularly stressful moments, you wondered if you’d survive it all.
Now, you’re sitting in an unfamiliar quiet calm wondering—did I? I feel so unlike the person I once was. Am I still me? Am I happy to have survived? To have this chapter at its end?
A friendly redpoll eating birdseed on our deck. I took this picture through the glass of our sliding door.
An Unwilling Survivor Reflects
If you’re like I was, you feel more like an unwilling survivor. As hard as some seasons were, you wish you could turn back the clock.
I felt this way at first. And maybe, on certain days or during particular times of year, a part of me always will be.
After all, there is nothing sweeter than those mothering moments when you’re profoundly aware of the gift you were given in each of your children.
The Lasting Impact of Motherhood
And nothing compares to the deeply transformative journey they’ve taken you on.
There may always be a portion of you that feels bruised. The remnants of a tearing, a part of you that once was and is no more.
Portions of your heart now walking around outside your body. And you with no power to protect them or control where or how far they go.
Emerging from Battle: A Mother’s New Reality
It’s a tearing unlike any other.
Emerging from this mothering season, you realize you’re battered and bruised, maybe even cut open in a few places, but you’re still in one piece.
A bit disoriented and maybe feeling a little lost, but also sensing a subtle stirring… a long neglected desire… when contemplating what to do with yourself now. It’s a sensation that’s thrilling yet disconcerting at the same time.
Embracing Change and Continued Motherhood
This new season doesn’t mean everything will be completely different.
After all, just because your children have entered their adult lives, doesn’t mean you’re no longer their mother. Or they no longer want or need you.
But it will hold significant changes.
Navigating New Dynamics with Adult Children
Figuring out these new relational dynamics and your new normal can take time.
I know it has for me.
If you feel cut adrift from your chaotic but well loved, familiar life and you wonder if you’ll ever feel normal again; be kind to yourself. You are navigating some of the most difficult transitions of motherhood.
Strategies for mothering transition
Below are three things I found helpful as I navigated my empty nest transition.
#1) Create New Traditions
As I thought about our post-childhood family, and as our kids spread their wings and flew off (literally) to venture into their adult lives; I wanted to do what I could to keep our connections lively and strong.
It became important to me to create easy opportunities for us to stay connected.
That is, if it worked for them, and they wanted that.
I took this photo on one of my daily walks around our acreage. I wish a photo could convey fragrance too.
Traditions and Strong Family Bonds
I’m a huge believer in the importance of family traditions, which are great opportunities to create and strengthen strong family bonds.
Yet, I also understand my role is now one of invitation.
I can create the opportunity and invite them to join, but pressuring, guilting or “making them pay” for not taking part are absolute relationship killers.
This has been the hardest part
It’s painful and scary to realize that while we’ll be deeply affected by the choices our adult children make, we have minimal to no input regarding those choices, regardless of how much they may end up affecting us.
I have found this to be one of the hardest aspects of being the mother of adult children.
But I digress.
Embracing Technology to Maintain Family Ties
A tradition I created during those early years was Sunday afternoon Zoom calls. We were spread out all across the country and that became our principal method of staying connected. The highlight of my week became those calls. The ones where we all made it to the call were my absolute favorite!
Innovative Ways to Keep Family Connected
If you’re wanting to start new traditions with your grown family, yet life is busy or you live far distances from each other, consider using technology.
Zoom calls,
a Facebook family group,
a family text thread,
Or try apps like Trello, Slack, WhatsApp, and Marco Polo. Each of these offers intuitive interfaces and helpful features designed to maintain family connection.
Creative Family Engagement Ideas
Get creative!
Besides a weekly Sunday family video call, consider sending out motivational Monday inspirations. Or make Saturday’s silly song day and send out a silly song each week.
Keep in mind the point isn’t to hear back from everyone every time. The point is simply to create a channel that stays open, even if you’re the only activity happening there. Your activity matters. If there is no validation coming back from your grown kids, it still matters to your goal you of family connection and bonds.
Some mushrooms in my yard after a rainy summer.
Adapting Expectations as Children Mature
#2) Stay flexible and manage your expectations.
While we can create opportunities for connection through new traditions; in order to take good care of ourselves as individuals with our own needs, we need to be prepared for last-minute changes when it comes to our adult children and their plans.
Understanding Independence in Adult Children
Especially when our kids first fly off to their own adult lives, their minds are typically preoccupied leaving little room for thoughts of mom or home.
This doesn’t mean they don’t care. Don’t love us or sometimes long for home and to be young and safe with us again.
If you’re tempted to feel offended at how little they seem to want interaction or connection; resist the urge.
Their apparent ‘disregard’ can be hurtful. But, it isn’t personal.
Take it as a compliment.
They are so sure of you, they can afford to tuck you into a corner of their world, knowing you’re a ‘constant’ and spend their time and energies on friends and more ‘uncertain’ things they can’t afford not to focus on.
Navigating Unanticipated Parenting Challenges
We discovered, as our grown-up kids started their adult lives, that staying flexible was very important.
For me, that looked like flying across the entire country with no prior notice to help one of our kids who needed some extra support during a difficult time in their life.
It also meant all of our grown kids moving back in with us for a time. In a strange coincidence, all of them at once, with in law child and grandchildren to!
Embracing the Second Birthing
These things weren’t on my ‘after kids’ radar and, frankly, I hadn’t considered that you really birth your children twice. Once into this world, and once again into their adult lives.
Both birthings are full of excitement but are also fraught with uncertainty and the potential for unexpected complications or outcomes.
To successfully navigate any unforeseen complications, in the best interests of both you and your grown child, it’s important to stay flexible during this ‘second birthing’ period.
Be patient. Birth takes time. If we allow for unforeseen circumstances and manage our expectations, the stress of the unknown and out of our control situations that do often happen will be substantially minimized.
Reconnecting with Yourself After Motherhood
#3) Connect with yourself again
I can only speak from my experience and from my observations over my lifetime, but mothering seems to have a way of disconnecting us from ourselves.
It can be a slow process to ‘find ourselves’ again. For some of us, we didn’t know ourselves that well before we became mothers, so our journey is more arduous than others.
Rediscovering Yourself for Life’s Next Chapter
This is a big topic, and this post isn’t intended to take a deep look into this. I’ll leave that for another day. But here are a few ideas meant to help the more disconnected of us find a place to start.
Discover new passions or rediscover old ones.
Use your newly freed-up time to try new things or revisit old hobbies and interests you may have put on hold. Join a book club or an exercise group. Try painting, gardening, writing, photography or turning all the photos you’ve taken throughout your kids’ lives into scrapbooks for them (and you). Any of these could be potential places to start.
I want to reiterate this point. This transition can be difficult. It can take time to regain that comfortable familiarity of life. Be kind and patient with yourself.
Are you going through this transition right now?
Have you successfully walked through this transition and are thriving on the “other side”?
I’d love to hear about your experience.
You can leave them in the comments below or email me at Sarah@herheartathome.com.
This post’s favorite family recipe is a little different. I’ve decided to also share recipes that help me minimize my dependence on pre-made or pre-packaged products. This recipe is one of those. When I make it, which is often, I use an immersion blender and Light Organic Olive Oil. I’ll often add a very small garlic clove too.
Until next time,
Sarah
Leave a Reply