PEACE & LONELINESS IN THE EMPTY NEST
Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 21.
Hello, my friends. I am coming to you from a very rainy morning and somehow that feels appropriate to this topic. I'm finding myself alone this week and it's been surprisingly uncomfortable.
The upside or maybe the downside of being a life coach is that when I find myself uncomfortable or experiencing a negative emotion, I immediately want to investigate it. So my first question to myself was, what's going on? Well, my youngest is still in the Bahamas and we haven't had much contact with him. Cell service is very spotty and the program he's participating in has strict rules about calling home.
So I've literally only spoken to him for 20 minutes three weeks ago. Notwithstanding my brave podcast on the fear of what-ifs, my mind continues to offer scary scenarios. I recognize that my brain is having a tantrum and grappling with my lack of control and visibility into what's going on with him.
So I'm willing to carry this subtle worry with me around like a handbag. Worry will just be my companion for the next four weeks. On top of this, my husband and my other son went away on a last-minute college trip.
So I find myself alone for about three days. This certainly isn't the first time I've been alone for extended periods of time. And to be honest, in the past, I've embraced these periods of solitude with excitement.
I remember a few years ago, staying home while the boys went on a ski trip. I think I had a work event that prevented me from joining them. And so I spent four blissful days at home, getting things organized, operating on my own schedule, enjoying a clean home, everything in its place, no one to cook for, no messes, no laundry, no driving anyone anywhere.
I was in heaven. And I remember getting so much done and spending more than a few hours indulging in guilty pleasures like binge-watching Bravo. Solitude doesn't bother me.
I'm an introvert, after all, although I often say I can play an extrovert on TV. If I have to, I can turn on the extroversion. And certainly, I am outgoing and social with my friends and with people around with whom I feel comfortable.
But I'd rather stay home than have to navigate a networking event or a party with strangers. Definitely not my favorite. They say the effective difference between extroverts and introverts is that extroverts derive energy from being with other people, while introverts derive energy from being alone.
This has always rung true for me. As an introvert, it's not that I can't engage socially with others. It just depletes my energy.
I recharge when I'm at home and typically love being alone. I think the other part about being alone for a mother is that we don't get to do it that often. Remember when the kids were little? You couldn't even go to the bathroom.
You rarely had the chance to put a door between you and your children. Getting a babysitter or going to work felt like I was getting away with something. When my boys were little, I started a business and started volunteering.
And the hours I spent working or volunteering were like me time. I love my kids, but I needed something for myself. So I'm an introvert and I've long cherished my solitude.
So how is it that I find myself feeling alone rather than at peace? It strikes me that as I approach the emptiness, this lonely, empty feeling is an experience that will be facing me more and more as the boys leave home and come home less frequently. I was watching TikTok and I saw a man talking about his daughter going to college. He said, if you've done your job as a parent well, your kids don't need you anymore.
And he went on to say, realizing this, my heart is breaking a little. Of course we wouldn't have it any other way. We want our children to launch and go out into the world confidently and independently.
But at the same time, we can't help but feel that in fact, we are the ones who are a bit dependent on them. Without realizing it, we can feel dependent because we're used to thinking the kids need me. I have to pick up John from his friend's house or bring Kate to school.
I have to pick up groceries for dinner tonight. This weekend we have a soccer game or a ballet concert. Do you even realize how much of your life has been wrapped up in your children's lives? Like an intricate web of interdependency, except our children are escaping the web.
They don't need us to drive them anymore. They have their licenses. Now they're going out with their friends for dinner.
They cook their own food, or they don't really know what their plans are until the last minute. So we're left hanging up in the air. Our weekends used to be filled with a variety of obligations connected to our kids' activities and parents of our children's friends.
And the number of these activities is waning. Certainly many of us begin to fill our calendar with visits to college. And we look forward to the summers when our kids are home, when the nest is full again, when we're together, everything seems right again.
But increasingly our lives are our own. And the purpose that we've built our lives upon is winding down. So often over the past 17 plus years, I have longed for more peace in my life.
There's something about having children that makes you wonder what you even spent your time doing before you had kids. As mothers, we find ourselves on an endless hamster wheel of managing our children's lives. On top of all of the other obligations we have, whether it be working, volunteering, managing the household, or taking care of other family members, we're constantly on the go.
And so it's really no wonder that there are a million different ways to chase that peaceful feeling we all want to capture, if only for fleeting moments. We go to yoga, we try to meditate, we go on retreats or walks. There are moments when we're able to capture this seemingly fleeting feeling of peace.
And then we re-enter the reality of our lives and it's like the peace has been yanked out from under us. I remember times when the boys were little, I was able to squeeze in every so often a late afternoon hot yoga class. I would leave and drive home feeling totally blissful.
And somehow the minute I got home, I was back to feeling overwhelmed. I got used to thinking that the circumstances of my life, the constant mess and the needs for my children, that all of this meant that overwhelm was inevitable. As the boys grew up, the stresses just got more complicated.
They weren't fighting and whining anymore, but they were sullen and not talking or dealing with their own complicated emotions, all of which made me worry more. Anyway, the point is that one would think that given how overwhelming and busy our lives have been for the past 15, 20, 30 years of raising these kids, one would think that we would fully embrace the moment when circumstances of our lives became still and we could breathe. I wonder if you've also found in your past that when you have been given a short break from the hectic pace of your life, you feel an amazing sense of freedom and gratitude to be alone.
You felt peace. Maybe there's something about the fleeting nature of it that made it so special. You knew that you would have your family waiting for you or they would be back home soon.
Before too long, you would have a home full of love and purpose waiting for you. You would get to experience a blissful break, but then you would be back to it. But now we're facing the reality of the day, and maybe it's come for you when your kids are no longer at home.
It feels like it happens all at once, or at least it has for me. Maybe that's because COVID kept us all locked up in the house together. We actually had dinner together every night for a year longer.
Then all of a sudden, poof, the boys got their freedom back and have launched into their young adult lives. So getting back to my feelings this week, what have I been feeling? Home alone, contemplating a few days of solitude, but in that moment, not feeling peace. I wasn't immediately sure what was going on.
The first thought that came to me was that I felt listless, like I didn't know what to do with myself. I guess another way I could characterize what I was feeling was I felt lost. It's weird because the minute I thought, I don't know what to do with myself, my brain's immediate response was that I had plenty of things that I could be doing.
There were plenty of chores or errands on my to-do list. I could have called friends, gone on a walk, but it was almost as if not only did I not know what to do with myself, but I didn't have any motivation to do anything with myself. I just felt lost.
I wondered why this was coming up for me now when no one was at home. If it was loneliness, it was an odd sort of loneliness because I didn't feel like the void could just be filled by calling a friend. I realized what I really wanted was for the order of my life to be put back in place.
I wanted both my sons up in their rooms with the door closed, and I wanted my husband to be sitting watching the History Channel on TV in the next room. I wanted to wonder what we were having for dinner and not eating another meal alone. It's almost as if I'd lost my anchor, like without the anchoring presence of my family in my home, I couldn't launch in the same way, like my life didn't have as much structure.
It felt like there were too many hours to fill. We spend so many years in this constant state of craziness and busyness, and all that we want is a break, some peace and solitude. I can't tell you how often I used to think that I wish I could have a moment alone, an afternoon without driving people around, an evening when I didn't have to worry about what everyone was eating for dinner.
But now I seem to have an abundance of moments alone, an abundance of solitude. One would think that I would have an abundance of peace, yet instead I feel lost. We can always find ways to fill our time, but there are times when it's like you can't move forward because there's just something blocking you, like a force keeping you from moving forward.
It feels heavy. We're exhausted. We feel unmotivated under the weight of our feelings.
And here's the problem. Sometimes the downside of just filling our time is really just a way to distract ourselves from the discomfort of whatever negative emotion we're feeling, lost, empty, bored, lonely. Often we seek ways to find pleasure in short-term solutions to make ourselves feel better.
So sometimes for some of us, it's eating or pouring a glass of wine. It might be scrolling on social media or shopping online, binging Netflix. There's so many ways that we can buffer against our emotions to just try to make them go away for a little bit.
And it works in the short term. The distraction, the dose of pleasure we get from the food, the wine, the likes on social media, it helps us not feel so bad in the moment. The problem is those buffers don't solve the underlying negative emotion.
It's still there and it's still waiting for us the next time we begin to confront our negative thoughts. The other downside is that sometimes those buffers lead to negative consequences, particularly if we tend to rely on them a lot. Like the snacks that make us feel better prevent us from fighting the already uphill battle of menopause weight gain.
Or the nightly glasses of wine make us feel awful the next morning. Scrolling on social media can be entertaining but also offer so many opportunities for comparing and despairing as we perceive other people's lives are so much happier or more exciting. So in my efforts to not buffer this listless lost feeling away, I allowed myself to feel it.
Without really understanding it, I reminded myself that the reason I was feeling the way I was feeling was because of a sentence in my brain that was keeping me from feeling peace. Even though in the past the circumstance of being alone had felt like the key to my peace, instead now I felt lost. You often hear people saying there is peace in solitude but there's not as much peace in loneliness.
Just because it's quiet, just because you have time for yourself doesn't mean that you're in a place of peace. I'm sure we've all experienced times in our lives when we felt alone. I was interested to find an article by Gretchen Rubin, the author of The Happiness Project, where she explored a number of different permutations of loneliness that I thought would be interesting to explore for us here.
Loneliness has many different flavors it seems depending on our perspective and maybe understanding these different flavors can help us unpack how this emotion might be coming up for us in our lives. There's certainly nothing wrong with us that we experience loneliness. In fact, it's one of those feelings that we all will feel at different times in our lives.
We're geared to seek social connection and so not having social connection can feel painful. Understanding what's driving these feelings can help us not only find peace in that loneliness but also to find ways to overcome the loneliness without resorting to buffering and distraction. So here we go.
Gretchen Rubin shares seven types of loneliness. The first type is new situation loneliness. This seems at first glance somewhat applicable in The Empty Nest.
She explains that this type of loneliness might occur if you've moved to a new city, maybe if you're recently divorced or started a new job. The driving force of this type of loneliness might be primarily the thought that I don't have anyone I can talk to or connect with here because of this new situation. It strikes me that this type of loneliness might also be something our children would be experiencing as they head off to college or start their own new jobs.
I don't know anyone here. I don't have a tribe. It's different than it was before.
The second type of loneliness Gretchen Rubin describes is I'm different loneliness. In this case you might feel lonely if you feel like an outsider. You're thinking you don't have anything in common with the other people around you and you could also be feeling isolated or judged.
Again this type of loneliness might be something we fear our children might face out in the world but we could also feel this way if we try new activities or try new experiences with people that we don't know as well to fill The Empty Nest. The third type of loneliness is the no sweetheart loneliness. We can feel this whether or not we have a partner.
If you're not romantically involved with someone and you want to be, you can feel the pain of this loneliness, the absence of the sweetheart, the romantic relationship. But many of us can also feel lonely in a committed relationship if we think the relationship isn't creating the connection that we're longing for. Number four, the no animal loneliness.
Gretchen shares while this isn't a type of loneliness she experiences, although she loves her dog, those of us who have a deep love of animals may experience this after the loss of a pet. The fifth type of loneliness is the no time for me loneliness. Gretchen explains that we can be surrounded by people involved and connected with say other women in a number of ways but that we don't perceive they want to become friends with us, that other people don't have time for me.
I see this a lot with many of us at this stage in life. Moms with younger children are still caught up in the whirlwind of their daily schedule taking care of their kids and so they don't always have time to make plans. Some women also feel like their friend card is full so they are not looking for additional friends while others of us may long for new connections, particularly if friends have moved away or moved on.
This type of loneliness is driven by thoughts like I wish I had a close group of friends but I can't seem to be able to or maybe I wish I could connect with one best friend in my town but I don't know where to find her. Another form of loneliness is what Gretchen calls untrustworthy friends loneliness. Sometimes we get to a place with old friends where we realize we're no longer a match.
Maybe they do things behind our back or maybe they also are into things you're no longer into. You can feel disconnected and lonely in these types of relationships even if you continue to spend time with these friends. And finally number seven, Gretchen describes the quiet presence loneliness.
This one hit the mark for me. We can feel lonely missing someone else's quiet presence even if we have plenty of friends or family living nearby. Even if we spend the day at work and feel connected to co-workers we can come home and miss having someone in the house, their quiet presence.
I actually felt like seeing that this type of loneliness was an actual thing helped me put my feeling into context. I was lonely because I was missing the close presence of my family but this absence was different than what I'd experienced in the past because of what I was making it mean. Before the empty house or the time alone I interpreted that as much needed me time.
Finally a chance to relax and take a breath but now the me time feels a bit overwhelming and endless. There seems to be too much of it. It's not a short respite from a hectic purposeful life but rather a yawning gaping ever-present reality.
In the past the moments of peace and quiet were precious, few and far between and now the moments of togetherness feel few and far between precious. For me the quiet presence loneliness feels the most relevant to my experience but you might be experiencing any of these other types of loneliness or some combination. Lonely in a new town if you've moved or if you've ended a long relationship.
Feeling lonely because you don't quite fit in. Feeling the absence of a romantic partner or feeling like other women you know don't welcome you as a friend or they're no longer the type of friend you think is right for you in this stage of your life. Notice that you can feel lonely whether you're physically with people or not.
You can literally be alone and not feel lonely or you can be in a sea of people and feel lonely. You can also feel perfectly at peace sitting at home alone and another day find yourself lonely. The feeling of loneliness highlights so clearly that the mere circumstance of being alone or not is not what's causing the painful feeling of loneliness but rather it's the story we're telling ourselves about how we wish things were different or how we're longing for the comfort of what we were used to.
Those moments of togetherness that we so loved that we don't feel are quite as accessible anymore. There's so many different forms of loneliness and all of us feel lonely at different times in our lives. During this transitional time when our kids are leaving the nest we may be grappling with changes in our romantic or other family relationships we may be moving.
So many changes, so many ways to feel lonely. Since we could probably all agree that all of us feel lonely at some time in our lives let's assume that feeling lonely is a circumstance that it is simply a fact in our life that we feel lonely. Now what? What do we make that mean? One response I see so often with my clients is the instinct to want the feeling to go away.
It's uncomfortable loneliness and so we can try to cover it up with buffers or activities or plans filling the void. This ultimately is a form of resisting the painful emotion. We push it down and avoid it as much as we can but it's always there under the surface waiting for the quiet moment to remind us that we're in pain, that we're lonely.
The more you resist the more you push it down the bigger it becomes. This very feeling that we don't want to feel becomes magnified and can actually keep us from processing the emotion and coming to terms with the new reality. So what's the alternative? It's simple but difficult.
You simply feel lonely. It sounds odd but so often we run away from the very feelings that we sometimes need to just allow to honor their presence. This is me sitting alone in my empty home thinking I wish the boys were upstairs in their rooms.
I wish my husband was coming home for dinner. I miss their quiet presence. I miss their precious proximity to me and guess what? Of course I do.
I've enjoyed the gift of their quiet and often not so quiet presence in my life for two decades. The reality is different now and so I feel lonely and it's okay. I can feel lonely.
After all lonely is just a sensation in my body. It feels heavy and dull. My limbs feel rooted to the ground like I would have a hard time lifting them.
It feels like there's a weight on my chest. My heart hurts. In fact it's breaking a little bit and right now it's okay.
In the past I welcomed solitude because I was thinking this is time for me and I felt peace and now I welcome the loneliness because I think this is the part of my journey as a mother. I was always going to have to let them go and it hurts right now. It feels lonely right now and I'm okay.
I can be at peace with this pain knowing that it's not forever and it's also the beautiful counterweight to the love and togetherness I've experienced for so many years. I don't have to make it mean that I can never move forward. I don't have to make it mean that the only way to get rid of it is to avoid it, to run away, to fill my life with other things so I don't have to think about it.
I can make peace with the loneliness. Peace and loneliness. We can find peace and joy and we can find peace in our pain.
The first step is to allow the pain to be there. Until next time friends.
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