RE-DEFINING YOUR PURPOSE IN THE EMPTY NEST
Welcome to the Small Job Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 55.
Hello, friends. It's kind of funny that amidst all of the ups and downs of parenting teens, on the other side of raising them to be independent adults, we have this crazy mix of emotions. We have this huge feeling of pride and joy, seeing them grow up and finish high school.
But there can also be this sense of loss. For me, that feeling of loss started well before the send-off to college, even years before graduation. In some ways, I think I felt this anticipation of the loss I knew I would feel when my sons eventually left.
Of course, I thought about it in some ways as the loss of the physical presence of my boys. I knew that when they left, I would miss seeing them every day, having them with me. And it's funny how you begin to feel this loss in anticipation just by thinking about it.
But in other ways, the loss feels more near-term, like the loss of the time spent in the car together once your kid gets their license. Their routine might not even change, but suddenly they no longer need you to be a part of it, shuttling them back and forth. At first, you feel relief that somehow you get hours back, not having to take so many round trips to all the activities, no more wasted time in the parking lot waiting for practice or rehearsal or whatever to let out.
And I remember many car rides spent with my boys in silence. It's not like my kids would be up for heart-to-heart at 7.30 in the morning on the way to school. And after school, they'd be too tired or preoccupied much of the time to talk.
But there were those precious times, those precious car rides, even if it was only 20% of the time, when for whatever reason my boys would have something to share and be willing to open up. And I loved those moments. Suddenly when they get their license, those opportunities to capture a moment of connection while you have them held hostage in the car, those moments are now rare.
And let's face it, when you're home, our kids are often behind closed doors or they're out with friends. There was a time when I planned my weekends to find ways to engage my kids and support their activities and needs. And once the boys became teens, I found myself not planning, just in case, just in case they decided to stay home and maybe they'd want to have dinner with me, just in case they needed a ride or a ride home, just in case they were going to have people over.
It's interesting that our kids can still fill our time, fill our sense of purpose and responsibility to them, even when they don't actually want to be with us. So this is a large reason why I've started to think about this time when our kids are still home with us as the road to the empty nest, because in some ways the nest already feels empty. And look, many of us have a different perspective on this time.
There are certainly some moms who can't wait for their kids to go off and be independent. And even if you feel some sense of loss as your child starts to spend less time with you, you can still at the same time be thrilled that they're more independent. Ultimately, how we look at this inevitable transition really does drive how we feel about it, for better or for worse.
But no matter our perspective, no matter the reality that we could choose a different perspective, the way we look at the reality of our kids growing up and eventually leaving home, that perspective is very real for us right now. And as I said, there are many different aspects of the connections we have with our kids that we may think that we're losing. Physical proximity, number of conversations, time spent together.
But on top of these perceived losses, which might make us feel sad or wistful, we can also think that this transition creates a loss of purpose. Finding or creating this purpose during our second chapter is one of the goals I work with many of my clients on. And so I thought I'd dedicate this podcast to exploring this topic, creating or redefining our purpose in the second chapter.
So let's start at the beginning. What is purpose? Psychologists define purpose as an intention to achieve a long-term goal that is both personally meaningful and makes a positive impact on the world. Okay, so long-term, meaningful, makes a positive impact.
So by this definition, parenting certainly fits the bill. It's long-term. In fact, one could argue lifelong, or as long as we're still alive.
Certainly beyond the time when our kids are still living at home with us. We'll always be our kids' parent. Raising kids is personally meaningful without question.
And one could argue that we're making a positive impact on the world, both by perpetuating our species and creating humans who will go out into the world and presumably do great things, or at least helpful, productive things. It's interesting to notice that purpose is not quantifiable based on this definition. Long-term is fairly vague.
Certainly time can be measured, but psychologists aren't putting parameters on the length of time necessary for something to be a real purpose. Long-term doesn't necessarily need to be a lifetime. It could be a decade, five years, maybe even six months.
Who's to say? The phrases personally meaningful and positive impact on the world are even more vague than long-term. How do you measure personally meaningful? Certainly not in dollars or a number of possessions. Not even in the number of kids you have.
And positive impact on the world? We could go down a rabbit hole on that one. Do you have to cure cancer or end wars to have made a positive impact on the world? Of course not. But how do you know if you've made a positive impact? This conversation is getting a bit existential, so let's bring it back to reality.
The point is, there is no way to quantify or measure the right amount of meaning or impact. It's all in the eye of the beholder. What's personally meaningful to you may not be personally meaningful to me, and vice versa.
So I'm not sure this definition is particularly helpful when we're thinking about how to redefine our purpose. Look, our role as mom isn't going away, but the number of hours we realistically need to invest in mothering our kids goes down significantly during the teen years, and eventually drops down to the occasional, hopefully at least the weekly, phone call. Even when we don't see our kids, we can keep a hold of our purpose as a parent when we invest time thinking about our kids, missing them, or worrying about them.
In fact, just as we can tend to spend time waiting around to be of assistance or for a fleeting moment of a connection with our kids when they're teens, we can continue to do this even when our kids are away. And look, there's absolutely nothing wrong with missing our kids and looking forward to the next opportunity to connect. But are you trying to fill the void of your child's absence by creating a lagging sense of purpose and responsibility? If you are, this isn't a judgment.
You get to parent and spend your time exactly the way you want to spend it. But I want to offer that purpose also can't be measured in time spent. But realistically, it may be that our kids actually need us to spend less time on them as they grow up.
So when thinking about how to create a new purpose, it might be helpful to reflect on why we became mothers in the first place. For some of us, it's because we love kids. Maybe we loved babysitting growing up, loved our little cousins or siblings.
This was definitely not my reason for having kids, as much as I've loved my own boys and also love my siblings. Many of us set out to have kids because we want to create a family, maybe replicating the experience we had growing up, or alternatively wanting to create an experience we didn't have growing up. In both of these cases, we're deciding to have kids because of a feeling we anticipate we'll feel.
Think about it. If we love kids or love the thought of creating a family, the feelings we're looking to create for ourselves are love, joy, connection and happiness. When thinking about creating purpose, it could be useful to think about the fact that the only reason we pursue any goal is because of how we think we'll feel once we've achieved it.
Do we have kids to give love? Absolutely. But we can't feel the love we give our children. We can only feel the love within ourselves.
So ultimately, we get to feel love and connection within ourselves when we have a family. At least that's how we likely started out on this journey. Why else do we decide to become moms? It could be that we think it's just what you do after you get married.
Maybe we're fulfilling a sense of inevitability, like once you're married, now what? Everyone else starts having kids. It's how everyone starts spending their time. It can actually be a bold decision to not have kids.
And it's interesting to consider that those who choose not to have kids certainly still have purpose in their lives. They lead purposeful lives with meaning that make a positive impact on the world, at least as they define it. So it was a decision we made when we had kids to pursue this purpose of parenting.
It wasn't a mandatory path. But some of us honestly make the decision to have kids because we're not really sure what else we would do. So call it checking a box, first comes love, then marriage, etc.
But we might make the decision to not feel the discomfort of doing something unexpected. Another reason some of us may have kids is because our partner wanted them, or our own mom pressured us into it. Maybe more out of a sense of obligation than true desire.
So we might make this decision so we don't have to feel guilty. Or we could have gotten pregnant somewhat unexpectedly, and then the decision was made for us. We had kids out of a sense of responsibility.
Although I mentioned that the positive impact on the world of having kids could be in part perpetuating the species, given the world's population and the traffic on the highways, I doubt many of us gave the human species argument much consideration when deciding to have a family. So the purpose we set out to create was to have kids with the benefits to us of being some combination of creating in our life love and connection, fulfilling a sense of responsibility, and also allowing us to avoid some negative emotions like guilt, boredom, and the discomfort of choosing not to have kids. We often think of motherhood as being a selfless act because of the sheer number of hours, days, and years we invest in raising our kids, keeping them safe, teaching them how to be responsible, caring individuals.
But being a mother, or a parent in general, is also selfish in the sense that we do get something out of it. We get this unbelievable love and connection. Being a parent is actually less a selfless act and more of an act of us wanting to create a feeling in us.
And of course, also in our kids, we want them to feel love and connection too, right? So what's happening when we feel a loss of purpose as our kids grow up? According to the psychologist definition, long-term, personally meaningful, and positive impact, what part of that are we losing? Well, in some ways, maybe a bit of all three. Of course, we don't stop being parents when our kids leave the nest, but the way we've defined our purpose, in other words, the way we've parented our kids up until now is inevitably changing. Whether we like it or not, we don't have control over our kids' decisions anymore.
Even if we don't think we want control, it can be disconcerting to realize our kids don't really want our input in their decisions anymore. They may no longer be as open about what they're going through or how they're approaching the choices they have in front of them. So as far as parenting goes, our purpose as parents will go on for a lifetime, but we're forced to revisit how we pursue that purpose.
Here's another question. Does parenting feel less personally meaningful once our kids grow up? Well, in some respects, no. Assuming you're still connected to your kids, you will get to see them over summers and holidays.
The love and connection you feel for your kids doesn't have to be tied to their physical proximity to you. Some moms even report that the relationship they have with their kids is better once they move out. When our kids are truly independent or acting independent and living in our home, it can be difficult to navigate boundaries.
So our feelings of love and connection can get even better when our kids move out. But when you look back on the reasons we became parents in the first place, wanting to create love and connection, a sense of responsibility, wanting to avoid feeling guilty or bored, do any of these ring true for us now that we have an opportunity to create a new sense of purpose in our next chapter? I could argue that all of them might be relevant. Certainly we always want to create love, connection, joy, and happiness, but notice how we have those things even when our aren't with us.
We feel love just by thinking about our kids. We feel love no matter what they do. Even when they infuriate us, we get to feel love.
We also get to feel connection to our kids no matter how far away from us they are, even when the doors are closed. If we want to look for reasons to not feel connected to our kids, we'll be able to find them, particularly as they grow up and try so hard to be independent. They are looking for a little distance from us, but it's not about us, it's about them.
So if we want to look at that distance and make it about us, we will for sure feel disconnected. But if we look at the distance our kids are creating as an opportunity to respect their journey and forge a new adult relationship with them, where we don't need to dictate the terms, a connection where they invite us back in, there couldn't be a greater gift. Look, the love and connection that we were looking for when we set out to have kids, we created that.
When our kids were little, when they were these adorable babies and toddlers who loved to cuddle, who looked at us as the heroes in their story, it wasn't hard to feel loved and connected, needed really. It's an unbelievably unique feeling to be the center of someone's universe. It can be overwhelming, as parenting inevitably is during the challenging parts of the baby, the infant and toddler years, sleepless nights and tantrums, but our kids look to us for love and connection when they were little, and so we mutually aligned.
We both filled that cup for each other. So it's natural for us to feel a little loss as our kids seek love and connection outside of us. We're no longer a center of their universe.
Some days we may not even feel like a distant planet in their universe, but again, we can look at this inevitable growth in our kids as a loss of connection or an opportunity to create a new connection, respecting our kids' terms. It strikes me that when we think about the purpose of raising kids, the reason we choose to do it in the first place, we probably don't include on the list creating an adult human. I mean, we could possibly be thinking we want to raise a child to take care of us in our old age, but given how far out that goal is, it certainly isn't a driving consideration.
But ultimately, that is the goal, to raise an adult. And the whole time we're raising this child and trying to teach them all the things and trying to get them to be responsible and learn from their mistakes, that whole time we're actually preparing them to make their own decisions and ultimately go out into the world without us. Yet somehow when that happens, it's like we're not ready.
Some of us may cling to the purpose, to our role as a parent, wanting to influence decisions and prove of significant others and make sure our kids are doing things in the right way. You may be listening to this and thinking, no, I don't do that. But I'm almost willing to bet that you do, maybe in small ways.
But all of us do. It's a habit that's hard to break. We can't help but have expectations and opinions.
We raised our kids with a purpose. And when they start veering off into unexpected directions, we can't help but voice our opinion and concern. No judgment here.
I've done this myself. But it's interesting to consider that if what we really want is to keep connected with our kids, are we holding on so tight that they're forced to pull away? Or are we better off letting go and giving them the opportunity to come back to us of their own volition? Which one will create more connection? So now thinking about our purpose as we look ahead, of course we want to maintain the love and connection we have with our kids. But there may be room to create more of this.
But just as we don't need our kids to be physically with us to create the feelings of love and connection, you actually don't need a spouse or a lover or a friend to create these feelings either. In fact, I would argue that the person who we might need to create the most feelings of love and connection with is ourselves. So often we put ourselves last as parents.
And we're so focused on our kids and their well-being that this energy and attention could even have come at the expense of our own well-being of the years, particularly if the last few years have held their fair share of anxiety and frustration. Think about it. Creating this love and connection for ourselves, that could actually be the highest purpose we could pursue in our lives.
Long-term? Absolutely. Personally meaningful? For sure. Positive impact on the world? Without a doubt.
Consider how much more love and connection there would be in the world if all of us gave a little more love and connection to ourselves. That we actually gave ourselves the ability to feel these feelings without needing to rely on anything outside of ourselves to create it. Does it sound too good to be true? The answer to that is simple.
What's actually holding you back from loving yourself just as you are? Feeling connected to yourself without having to accomplish anything? When we think about purpose, we so often think about doing something. After being so busy as a parent for so long, it might seem like the biggest challenge we face is figuring out how to fill our time. Similar to the reason some of us might have chosen to become parents in the first place.
We don't want to feel bored or guilty that we're not doing something meaningful or important. In my conversations with clients, I hear so many women express a number of reasons why it feels challenging to figure out how they want to fill their time in the empty nest. There could be many things standing in the way.
Often clients will express a lack of motivation. That they just don't feel up to the challenge of doing something that feels hard. Often people will say they just don't know.
That they have no idea what they want to do or what will make them happy. Sometimes we can feel stuck in the sadness of what we've lost in terms of the day-to-day role as a mom. Or we'll beat ourselves up for not maintaining a skill set that we deem is employable.
That we think our options are limited because we've just been a mom. Or maybe we've been working and we're sick to death of our old job, but we have no idea what will make us happy as an alternative. And of course with any new path, we're afraid.
We fear failure, humiliation, disappointment, regret, looking stupid. In short, there's a long list of negative emotions standing in our way of figuring out what comes next. So it makes sense that we feel stuck right now.
It makes perfect sense. But also remember that it wasn't our kids that created the love and connection, the joy, the happiness, and pride. It was us all along that created them.
The way that we looked at our lives and created those feelings of joy, of happiness, and love. So as you contemplate your next chapter, consider that it's not the job or the hobby or the activity or the goal. None of those things are going to create a sense of purpose or pride or love or connection or accomplishment, whatever feeling that you most want to cultivate.
It's going to be you that creates that. So the question isn't what should your new purpose be? The question is what's standing in your way from creating it? My friend, the next version of you is waiting to discover herself. And this is exactly what I explore with my clients in MOM 2.0. What is standing in your way of creating and feeling your purpose right now?
Until next time, friends.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program MOM 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
