WHEN OUR KIDS COME HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS
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 30.
Hello, my friends. It's December. I love this time of year.
And I hate a little bit too. I have so many memories of happiness surrounding this time of year, the traditions we had growing up with my parents, many of them that I've continued with my own family. I remember all of the years decorating the house, putting up the Christmas tree.
I continued this tradition my mother had with the advent calendar. Although of course in my effort to be that super mom, I had to supersize this advent tradition. My mother used to hide a few Hershey kisses in the same place every night.
We would stand around an advent calendar that she had made by hand with cross-stitch. There was a different Christmastime figurine for every date leading up to the 25th. And we would tie a ribbon around a ring for each date and sing a Christmas carol.
And then we would run into the living room and open that very same drawer every night. And there would be a few Hershey kisses, maybe a Christmas ornament that she had made. We loved every single night.
So when my first son was born, I cross-stitched my own advent calendar and introduced the same tradition to my boys as soon as they were old enough to sing along. At first it was small, a little candy after the Christmas carol. And as the years went on, somehow I decided to make it even bigger.
I started writing poems from the advent fairy and eventually these poems led to treasure hunts around the house. I had to work so I would hide all the notes that I had pre-printed and designed in PowerPoint early in the morning. And I would hide these notes all around the house to set up the treasure hunt that would eventually lead them to some place in the house where they would find some little treat.
A few Hershey kisses, maybe a candy cane, maybe one of those Christmas Pez dispensers. I used to buy Christmas candy treasures in bulk so that I always had something on hand for the end of the hunt. Eventually the boys got wise.
I love my younger son for playing along as long as he did. God love him. He knew a good thing when he had it.
He played along long after he stopped believing in Santa. Maybe it's because he didn't want the presents to stop. But there's a part of me that thinks he probably did it because he saw how much it meant to me, the tradition, the excitement of it, the magic I was creating.
He didn't want me to be disappointed. I tell you this story not at all to brag about my ridiculous advent adventures. I have no doubt that you have your own beautiful traditions, whatever your faith or culture.
We all have our ways of making time with our family together special. It doesn't have to come with gifts or pomp and circumstance. It can be as simple as the tradition of having a weekend meal together.
The point I want to make is that around these holidays, again, whatever your faith, you've likely had some lovely traditions with your children over the years. And as they've grown up, you've had to let go of some of them. So there's this amazing nostalgia around this time, whether it's from our own childhood or from the childhood we created for our own kids, or maybe even nostalgia for what we've always thought these holidays were supposed to look like based on the movies we've seen on TV, the happy families.
We want that. We want to create that. And so many of us as mothers feel some responsibility for creating that.
But now our kids are grown up. There's a part of me that was relieved when I didn't have to run around hiding treasure hunt notes anymore or having to double purchase gifts to be sure there was a pile from Santa and also a pile from us. I loved when my kids started helping us keep the magic of Santa alive for their younger cousins.
There's something fun about passing on the secret and having them be in on it. So all of this nostalgia surrounds these holidays. And now our kids are gone to college or maybe off living their lives already with a significant other or even a family of their own.
These holidays start to look quite a bit different. On the one hand, this time of year, I see many parents posting about how happy they are to have their kids home. And of course, we love having our kids home when we have them.
Any time we have with our kids, once they leave the nest, it's precious, but it's also different. In every stage of life, our kids have grown up just a bit, sometimes in big ways, sometimes in very small ways, sometimes in ways that make us feel incredibly proud, bursting with love and admiration and gratitude. And sometimes they grow up in ways that have us utterly at a loss for how to help, how to guide them, how to keep them from making mistakes that will take them down the wrong path.
Let's just start with our kids coming home from college. I can imagine that most of us can't wait for our kids to come home. We've missed them so much.
Their empty room is finally filled again. We get to revisit all of our beloved traditions. We fill the refrigerator with their favorite foods.
We think about the dates we'll take them on, running errands, going out to dinner. In all of the ways you envision spending time with your kid or even just experiencing the joy and relief of having them safe under your roof again. Imagine it.
It's amazing. Except when it isn't. Don't get me wrong.
We love our kids. We're so happy to have them home, but we also find ourselves feeling sometimes disappointed, frustrated, worried, annoyed, anxious. One of my clients recently said it's like when they're gone, it's out of sight, out of mind, and then they come home and somehow it triggers so many worries and frustrations.
So I thought it would be worthwhile for us to talk about this because here it is, it's early December. Your kids may have just been home for Thanksgiving, or maybe they couldn't make the trip. But I can imagine if you have college age kids, or even if you have adult kids who are older, you may likely have a chance to see them over the holidays.
So now's a good time to really think intentionally about what we want to create with this time, this precious time we get with our now adult kids over the holidays. So what do we want to create? Well, for me, I want to create a sense of connection. I want to laugh with them, revisit inside jokes.
I guess if I'm honest, I want them to want to be with me together as a family again. I want them to be open and to share what's going on with them. I want to hear everything.
I want to know how their classes are going, who their friends are, who they're dating. I want to know, are they happy or are they lonely? Are they on top of their assignments? Do they know what they're going to do this summer? Do they have a plan? On the one hand, I think all of these questions, they seem perfectly reasonable and perfectly acceptable that I as a mother might want to know these things, that I might expect to connect with my children in this way. But here's what I've noticed.
Alongside the happiness that we have to finally have our kids back at home, we feel a whole host of other emotions that we don't want to feel. Let me give you a few examples. Here's a big one, the curfew.
So you probably enforced a curfew when your kids were in high school, but now they come home and they've been living without a curfew at college or in their real independent life for some time. They come home and suddenly they want to go out with their friends. And the time they are home becomes a point of contention.
You might not tell your child that they have to be home by a certain time, but you kind of hope that they will respect the curfew that they've lived by when they were living with you before. Or at least you hope they'll keep you in the loop. Certainly that they won't stay out all night, except for that they don't come home at the time you thought they might be home, or they don't update you about their plans.
Maybe they do stay out all night or they stay over at some friend's house who you might not even know. So interesting, right? Our kids have been away doing whatever they've been doing. You have no real idea what time they've been coming home at college or where they've been sleeping, unless they tell you.
But now that they're back under our roof, it suddenly becomes our business again. Out of sight, out of mind really does feel appropriate here. We know we can't govern our kids when they're away, but when they're home, don't they know that we worry about them? Don't they realize how excited we were for them to be home in their old bed? And now they're not.
They're out and we're waiting up again or sleeping restlessly until we can confirm that they're safe at home. Think about it this way. When they're in college, they might be out until 4am and now they're home and they might also be out till 4am.
The only change in circumstance is their location and the fact that we can observe the circumstance when they're home. And the reason that's important is because now that we observe, now that we can see what they're doing, we have opinions about it. We have thoughts.
And typically, when it involves our kids staying out till 4am and doing things that make us worry even more about them, we have thoughts that make us feel terrible, worried, anxious, even angry. But just notice the only difference in these circumstances is that now when they're home, we know what they're doing. Here's another scenario.
Our kids come home and we have a certain set of expectations around what that will look like. Maybe again, that's how we spend our time together or whether they're excited to engage in the old traditions again. We might also have a bit of an agenda for our time together.
For example, we might want to get a better sense about how they're really doing, how their classes are going. We're hoping they'll open up to us. Or maybe we have an agenda around some encouragement, some direction we hope to push them in that we haven't been able to make much headway with when they've been at school.
So we might want to confirm that their classes are in order for next semester or that they have a plan in the works for summer break. Maybe they're juniors or seniors and graduation is looming. So the question about what they're doing over the summer feels even more critical because time is ticking.
They're going to be out in the real world soon and they need to get on the task of figuring out what they're going to do next. Look, we don't see our kids that much anymore. Depending on how talkative your child is over the phone or how much they respond to text sometimes or email rarely, you may or may not feel like you've had the opportunity to really sit down with your child and help them set their course for the future.
These times together when our kids are home, they seem like they're the perfect opportunity to check in and make sure they're on the right track. It all sounds perfectly reasonable. And you know what? If you have the kind of kid who comes home and can't wait to sit down with you and tell you all the things and ask for your advice and they follow it and they want to work with you to make a plan for the future, if that's your child, that's awesome.
I can imagine that the circumstance of talking to your adult child and having them say, thanks, mom, that's great advice. I'm going to do exactly what you just told me to do. If that's your reality, I'm so happy for you.
What an incredible feeling that must be to think it's all going to be okay. They're taking my advice. If that were the case for me, I can imagine I'd feel some sense of relief, a reduction in my anxiety because they're doing what I'm saying they should do because I know best, right? I know what's good for them.
I have their best interest at heart. I have more experience than they do. They should listen to me, right? And look, it actually doesn't matter whether we're right or wrong.
My point is, how many of us have this experience with our kids where our kids just go along with everything we tell them to do? My gut tells me very few of us. Maybe sometimes they agree and they go along. Maybe some of our children are more open to guidance than others.
But for the most part, our kids are not going to do what we tell them to do just because we think it's the right thing to do. So this impacts just about everything, right? Our kids might agree that they need to sign up for classes, but they just haven't gotten to it yet. They don't feel the same sense of urgency that we do.
Or they might conceptually know that they need to find a summer job, but they're burnt out from school and they don't want to spend time thinking about it over winter break. They might know that they have to decide on a major, but they're still on the fence. Their timeline isn't our timeline.
Or maybe they're not undecided, but rather they're very sure that they want to do something entirely different from what we want them to do. For example, they might want to live off campus next year and you're not sure it's safe. Or they want to be an English major and you were really thinking they were on the path to be a doctor.
Maybe they're dating someone who's taking up a lot of their time and energy. Or they're rushing a sorority or fraternity and you're nervous about the dangers you've heard about. Or maybe even experience yourself in college.
The bottom line, their timeline is not our timeline. Their priorities, not the same as ours. Their direction, potentially not in line with what we wanted for them.
So you can see the train wreck coming, right? Even if you and your child ultimately have the same goal, the mere fact that you are both approaching the goal with very different mindsets makes conflict almost inevitable. What they want is not what you want. They have different goals or a different path they want to follow.
But here we are, their parents, facing this precious time that we have together with them over the holidays and we can't help but look forward to the chance to sit down with them and tell them all the reasons why they need to consider our perspective. Maybe do things our way. Or maybe we know we can't force them anymore but we really hope they'll take us seriously.
If we can just say it the right way, convince them, maybe then it will all turn out okay. And mama, I know that's all you really want, right? You just want it all to turn out okay. Even those of us who desperately want our kids to be doctors or have a specific major or get an internship or a summer job or whatever we want for our kids, I want to go out on a limb and suggest that whatever you want for your child, it has less to do with the specifics, the profession, the major, the employer.
It has less to do with the details than the impact of those details. In other words, what we make those details mean. Maybe we believe that if our kids are doctors, they'll inevitably be successful.
Whatever our perception, this lens colors the way we interpret the decisions our children are making. And all of it comes down to our concern for their happiness and success in life. It's really all we've ever wanted for our children to be happy, successful, safe, healthy, just those things.
It sounds wonderful and altruistic that we just want our kids to be happy. It's not about us, right? But here's an interesting question. What happens if our children are not happy, not successful, or at least struggling, maybe doing things that might jeopardize their health and safety? Or what if they seem to be failing to launch, not taking responsibility for their life in the way we would like them to? So many of us mothers go to the worst case scenario in our minds, maybe not even explicitly, but there's a sentence in our minds that goes something like, if they keep doing this thing, then they're going to face this other terrible thing.
If my daughter doesn't get started finding internships for the summer, she's not going to get one. And that will impact her chances of getting a job after college. If my son doesn't start taking school seriously, he could fail out of school.
And then what? My daughter's alcohol use is going to get her into trouble, put her in a dangerous position, or worse, make her an alcoholic. It sounds kind of dramatic, but be honest with yourself. Doesn't your mind go there sometimes? At least we sense this anxiety around the decisions our kids are making, or lack of decisions, and why.
Why do we care if they get a few bad grades, or go out partying a few nights a week, or they choose to relax over winter break instead of looking for jobs? Then there's even the small things that can piss us off, if we're honest. When they come home, they leave a mess everywhere, or maybe they spend most of their time with their friends instead of at home. Maybe you have to deal with haggling over the car again, or piles of laundry that weren't there before.
For a few days it feels nice to have our homes full again, but then we notice that some of the old frustrations that we used to feel when they were in high school come creeping back in. We can beat ourselves up about it, because we remind ourselves how much we've missed them when they were away, so we should feel happy doing their laundry again, or putting up with the mess around the house. We love our kids so much, we've missed them, and yet when they come home we can experience this unwelcome, unexpected frustration and anxiety that we wish wasn't there.
Here we are, it's the holidays. We have this beautiful nostalgia and expectation about what the holidays should look like, and here we are, here they are, messing it all up. If we could just get along, if they could just be a bit more flexible, understanding, maybe compliant.
Here's something to consider. The way we feel, it's actually all about us. It's easy to put it on our kids, I mean, they are the cause of our worry and frustration, right? But I want to give you a gift.
It's not about them. It's not. It's about you.
And I don't mean this in an accusatory way. It's actually kind of freeing to know it's about me. I'm actually the one creating my own pain.
All I want is for my kid to be happy, safe, healthy, and successful. And I've spent my entire life, months before they were even born, dedicating myself to their well-being, their happiness, their success. My children have been a North Star for me, my purpose.
And let's face it, we get quite a bit of joy and pride and satisfaction from seeing our kids self-actualize, from seeing our kids smile and laugh. We can't actually experience their joy, but we see theirs and we interpret it for ourselves. Maybe we think everything is right with the world, I can relax.
Maybe even there's nothing I have to fix right now. We feel joy and pride and satisfaction, relief. We take so much responsibility for our children's lives.
We've had to. It's the job description of being a mother. We're responsible.
And the switch doesn't just get turned off just because our kids perceive themselves to be independent adults. We still feel responsible. So the tricky part is that when we see our kids struggling, or just when we perceive that they're not making the right decisions, or don't seem to be as motivated to be as successful as they should be, whatever it is that we're expecting from them that they don't seem to be living up to, when we see them veering off the right path, we still feel responsible.
And so many of us, when we project this wrong path down into the future, we not only take responsibility, we can truly believe that it will be our fault if the worst happens. And not because we caused it, not at all, but we look into this horrible future and fear that it will be our fault because we couldn't keep this terrible thing from happening. We should have done something different, tried harder, forced them to see.
So here we are, it's the holidays, and we're under so much pressure to avert this future danger. So we have an agenda. We need them to see our perspective.
We need them to listen and take action. We need to see progress. So much pressure on us, on them.
So here's the gift I want to give you this holiday season. Now that your child is an adult, it's not your responsibility. Their life, their success, their happiness, even their health and safety, it is not your responsibility.
And of course, I don't mean that you give up on them. As parents, we will always be here for our children when they need us, as long as we are around and able. That's my commitment to my children.
No matter when, no matter what, I'm here for you. But I'm realizing that they are the only ones who can make themselves happy and feel successful. I can't do it for them.
And honestly, if they don't want my advice or think I'm wrong, they certainly aren't going to feel happy doing what I want them to do. Notice for yourself when you feel anxious about something you need your child to see, to change, or to do. It's actually because we are trying to avert the possibility of feeling, yes, the pain of seeing our kids in pain, but also the shame of seeing our kids in pain.
But mama, it's not your fault. It's not your responsibility. So consider this.
As you go into this holiday season and you welcome your adult children home, I invite you to witness who they are, who they want to be. Notice your judgments about them and question whether you might be wrong about what they need to change or what they need to do. They are pursuing their own path to happiness and success, and we can't create it for them.
For sure, they're going to be disappointed sometimes, maybe unhappy, maybe they'll even fail. And all of that is going to make them stronger and help them learn. Take yourself off of the hook.
And look, you get to set boundaries when your kids are home. You get to lovingly remind them to be careful. You get to offer your advice.
But just notice your agenda. What if that worst case scenario is just a figment of your imagination? No more likely to happen than any of the other billion possibilities of your child's life. The future is yet to be written, and you can't be certain about how the story is going to turn out.
We can't avert all of the danger any more than we can guarantee the success and happiness for our kids. You can't control your child's future or even their feelings, but you can influence how you feel right now. Observe your child exactly for who they are right now and sit in the wonder of it all.
The parts you adore, the parts you wish might change just a bit. Witness all of it and know that it's perfect exactly as it should be right now. And it might change.
For sure it will evolve as our children continue to mature and grow up and learn and fail and succeed. All of it is going to change. The story is still unwritten.
And most importantly, take yourself off the hook. You created this beautiful human, and all of the love, all of the traditions, all of the lessons and values you have instilled in them over the years, they are all in there. Now you get to sit back and marvel at the beauty of your creation, mama.
Happy holidays, friends.
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