TRAP #8 - IDENTITY CRISIS
Welcome to the Small Jar 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 73.
Hello, my friends. So my son came home for fall break. It's only been three weeks since I've seen him last, but I was still so happy to see him.
This beautiful son and I have been through a lot, but we've come out on the other side. And so I find myself incredibly grateful whenever I think about how far we've come. A few years ago, I was talking to a therapist about some of the challenges we were going through.
And she said to me, your son is trying really hard to pull away from you. My immediate reaction was, you're wrong. What do you know? As often happens with therapists, she had been asking me questions about my past and my upbringing in an effort to understand how that might have impacted the way I raised my son, and maybe therefore how I potentially caused or at least influenced what was happening with him as he grew up and sought independence.
I'm not saying I got it all right as a parent. I've shared many times in the past that I'm not perfect, and I have many regrets. But by and large, the trauma or codependency or whatever demons the therapist was looking for in our family closet just weren't there.
So when my son started pulling away in a breathtakingly shocking way, I was completely off guard and to be honest, defensive. What had I done to deserve this? And here was this therapist telling me, or at least at the time I interpreted what she was telling me as, he's pulling away and it's your fault. Talk about a punch in the gut.
I realized looking back now, this wasn't at all what she was saying. The therapist wasn't telling me my son's behavior was my fault. But if I'm honest, I didn't help the situation.
When I started seeing red flags with my son, I did what most mothers would probably do. I tried to fix it. For a while, I tried to reason with him.
I moved on to nagging, reiterating, looking for different ways to say the same thing, spending sleepless nights going through scenarios. As my efforts to fix the situation clearly failed, I moved to panic, controlling, screaming, crying. This is around the same time I started to reach out to therapists to try to figure out if there was something I was missing.
Clearly I was losing control of myself. And I recognized that the only impact of this was that I was pushing my son farther away, doing the opposite of what I actually wanted. And here's this therapist telling me he really wants to pull away from you.
The subtext I read into that comment was, look at you, of course he wants to pull away. From the moment I became a mom, I took this role very seriously. But I'd be lying to you if I ever thought of myself as good at it.
I found comfort in creating structure. So I made it my mission early on to get my boys on a predictable nap schedule. I tried to get them to bed at a predictable time.
The days were mundane, like Groundhog Day sometimes. But when everyone ate and napped on a schedule, I gave myself permission to think I was doing something right. We all do this to a certain extent, create expectations of ourselves and our role as mothers, and then judge ourselves against these expectations.
I've spoken often about this goal we all share as moms to help our children stay safe and healthy, be happy, and create success. All of these terms are relative. And how we might define these goals for our children varies at each stage of their lives, and also varies based on the people they are, and by our values and priorities.
So many factors influence our own personal definition of safety, health, happiness, and success. But generally speaking, these goals are pretty universal for us as moms. Becoming a mother has been the most important role that I've ever taken on.
More important than any career I've pursued or any personal goal. The importance and the worthiness of caring for these two human beings has eclipsed every other priority of my life. Being a mother has become my identity.
You can think of an identity as the beliefs, values, interests, and roles that define who you are as an individual. Your identity is a multifaceted concept that shapes how you perceive and understand yourself and how you interact with the world. Obviously, your identity includes personal attributes like your gender, your age, your ethnicity.
It also includes values that are important to you, and these have been shaped by your upbringing and experiences. Your identity also includes roles you have in your life, like being a mom, a wife, a daughter, sister, friend, employee. All of these roles factor into who you are.
Identity also includes things that give you personal fulfillment, your sense of purpose, your goals. And last, I think perhaps most critically, identity is essentially a compilation of all of the thoughts you have about who you are. Essentially how you perceive and think about yourself.
So based on this definition, our identities are complex, influenced by many factors, but ultimately our identity quite literally comes down to how we think about ourselves. That's really it. Now we can go down a rabbit hole analyzing why we think about ourselves the way that we do, exploring past trauma and blaming our parents or past experiences for our lack of self-esteem or our inability to process emotion.
And don't get me wrong, if you have experienced trauma in your past, learning to process and work through these experiences can be critical to moving forward. But no matter what's true about your past, you are here now. You are where you are.
You have this view about who you are right now. So now what? Let's keep this in mind for a minute and explore our identities as moms, because it's quite possible that you, like me, have given priority to this role over every other role in your life. Being a mother can overshadow our focus on our romantic relationships, our friendships, our connections with our own parents even.
That's not to say that we necessarily think of any of these other roles as not important or that we love these other people any less. But when it comes to our focus and attention, motherhood has become our paramount priority. And everyone gets it, right? Raising little kids is all-consuming.
And as we've been learning in our life with teens, this stage isn't any less consuming, it's just different. I've heard people say that raising little kids is physically exhausting, while raising teens is emotionally exhausting. I've definitely found that true for myself.
We embrace the role of motherhood and it becomes this central facet of our identity. And in so many ways, being a mother has given us a profound sense of personal fulfillment. It's given us purpose.
It's created a set of goals for us that we haven't even really had to work hard at creating. Meaning, in the early days, our goal was quite literally to keep our child healthy and thriving. Then at some point, we'd try to get them to sit or walk or talk.
Then they're ABCs. Whether we realized it or not, becoming a mother gave us a powerful purpose where the milestones were clearly defined. It's like we drove onto a super highway where you don't have to think about the turns because we're quite literally all going in the same direction.
It's just a matter of how fast your car goes and how you deal with the challenges along the way. I'm not saying that being a mother has been easy. We're carrying precious cargo.
Our children are quite literally the most important part of our lives. We'd do anything to keep them moving forward. And there can be so many times along the way that we think we're doing it wrong.
But this role has given us a proud sense of purpose and meaning. It's given us an important identity. As we've been traveling along this highway of raising kids, our role as a mom has gradually been shifting.
We started out as a caregiver, literally responsible for our child's every need. Then at some point, as they slowly began to explore the world with increasing independence, we needed to become a cop, teaching our kids right from wrong, establishing rules, sometimes enforcing consequences. This cop stage might begin when our kids are toddlers, but it extends into high school.
But at the same time, for many of us, we never quite let go of the caregiver role. So then we get to high school. We still want to be a caregiver, but we feel like we need to play the cop.
But what our kids start needing from us more is for us to be a coach. They might need us to give them advice, maybe even help them set up systems so they're able to pursue their goals and prioritize their responsibilities effectively. I think of a coach as someone who can be tough, but also who believes in the person they're coaching.
The coach has a mindset. If you put in the work, you can accomplish anything. In a perfect world, I imagine this is what parenting is supposed to look like in high school.
Like in the movies, the coach might say, honey, you've got two tests this week. How are you going to tackle that? And the teen says back, right, coach, I mean, mom, I'm going to study two hours a day and go to the teacher if I need help. How often has it been that simple for you when you've tried to coach your kids? I guess it depends on the kid, the subject, the kind of day your child has had.
So many factors. But it feels like it rarely looks like us moms giving some friendly advice and our teens saying, sure, mom, sounds like a plan. Or you're right.
I'll get right on that. In this continuum of our evolving role as mom, it starts with caregiver, evolves to caregiver and cop. And then at some point we start trying to coach, realizing we can't just punish our kids into complying.
But the ultimate goal of this continuum is for us to be able to drop being the caregiver and the cop, and even eventually drop being the coach, and that we should be able to become a consultant, a trusted confidant, a mentor, someone whose input is valued and trusted. But the flip side of being a consultant is that you might offer advice, but that you leave it up to the client, in this case, your child to take or leave the advice. Funny story, when I graduated from college, it seemed that the majority of my peers were pursuing only two career paths, either investment banking or management consulting.
So without a clue of what I wanted to be when I grew up, I followed the crowd and applied to both, hoping someone would hire me until I figured out what I wanted to do. My dad still gets a kick out of sharing the story of my wall of shame, which is where I hung all of the rejection letters I received. Luckily, one investment bank hired me, but I did get pretty far in the interview process with a few consulting firms, and this is what I learned.
Consultants are hired for a confined period of time to help fix a problem or improve something in particular. And then once that job is done, they're out of a job. The other aspect of the role is that often consultants are asked to come in and evaluate something within a business.
They spend time doing research and understanding the problem. Then they present a report with recommendations. At this point, then they're often finished with their contract.
The firm then takes these recommendations and decides how or even whether or not they want to move forward with these recommendations. I share the story because as we get into this period of time with our kids, when we're trying to be or graduate into becoming a consultant, where we often run into problems is that we give advice. We offer our recommendations to our kids, but we are very invested in whether or not they follow our recommendations.
It's kind of like a consultant delivering a report to, say, Apple with the recommendation being that they should really make it easier to type on the iPhone screen. You might guess that this particular consultant is in their mid-50s. So Apple might read the recommendation from this consultant and decide, thanks for your input, but this is why we implemented voice-to-text and we're going to disregard your advice.
Now in business, the consultant would have to walk away from this with no recourse. It's not like the consultant is going to follow up and nag or remind Apple to take their advice or come up with more evidence than voice-to-text also sucks, and it doesn't help middle-aged people use the phones more effectively. Contrast this story of the business consultant with the way we often try to play the role of consultant or even coach with our teens.
How many times during every single day do you give your teen advice? I'm going to guess that it's at least once every time you talk to them, on average. Maybe more. A few pieces of advice sprinkled into every conversation.
Just an hour ago, I had a conversation with my son asking him about his plan to study for tomorrow's AP government test. He then mentioned a wrestling injury. We talked about ways he might speed the healing process.
I asked him if he was going to practice SAT today. Last night, as he headed out to a party, we reminded him not to get into a car with anyone who had anything to drink. As I reflect honestly about my intentions with these conversations, I was clearly conveying a recommendation and also an expectation that my son follow my advice.
I'm not going to discipline him or play the role of cop with him for not following my advice, with the exception of the rule about getting into the car with the drunk driver. But I am definitely sure as I was asking him these questions and offering my input that he didn't miss that I was also setting an expectation of how I hoped he would respond. In the past, this would be the kind of thing that I would follow up on or start nagging about if I didn't see progress.
Our kids are frankly ready for us to move to that next stage of parenting far sooner than we're ready to let go of the role. Caregiver. I still want to be that for my kids.
The last time my son was home, he remarked there's nothing to eat. And this after I had made him dinner the night before and had made a special effort to buy all of his favorite snacks. Even though he's perfectly capable of cooking his own meal, I still think of it as my responsibility to care for him.
But there's something comforting for me to be able to take care of my boys when they'll let me. The cop. My boys have definitely been ready for me to give up that role.
But that's a hard one too. When the risks of messing up are so high, when do you trust? When do you verify? How strict should the rules be? And when do you let the rules go? Equally agonizing is that transition to being a coach, kind of a blend of being a cop and a consultant. How do you know when it's time to let go? Let go of that old role that your team wants you so desperately to shed.
And let's not forget, these roles are part of our identity, our purpose. These roles are the how-to of us supporting our kids and helping them stay safe, find happiness and success. Even when we have strong relationships with our kids, it's normal for them to want to pull away as they approach college.
Their desire for independence and autonomy is a normal part of the developmental process for them. Being a teen involves a natural quest for independence and honestly a search for their own identity, separate from us as their parents. This is not only normal, but if you think about it, it's in line with our goals for them, which culminate in them becoming independent, self-supporting adults.
Our teens' desire to pull away is also about asserting control over their own lives. And here's the rub. As our kids pull away and we sense danger because we're not sure they're making the right decisions, we often try to assert more control over them in our effort to navigate our roles as cop, coach, and caregiver.
Is it any wonder that this often results in them pulling away even more? So here we are as moms facing an identity crisis. I actually had expected that this would happen to me when my kids left for college and then I had to grapple with becoming an empty nester. But I've been surprised to find how much sooner this identity crisis hit me.
I wasn't prepared. As much as the caregiver role stressed me out when my boys were little, when they were younger boys before they hit puberty, they were awesome. They were generally happy.
They actually wanted to spend time with me. We could go on family adventures easily. Sometimes I wonder if I truly cherished that golden time as much as I should have.
It felt like there was so much validation in those years. My kids loved me and they weren't embarrassed to show it. There seemed to be so much more evidence that I could point to that gave me permission to believe that I was a good mom.
But when we got to the cop stage, when I had to make sure assignments were turned in and tests were studied for, I had to monitor bad language and fights with friends, then cell phone use, and on to more challenging things like going to parties and making safe choices. The cop stage doesn't feel nearly as rewarding, particularly if your teen gives you reasons for concern. Even when you think you get it right, there's no positive feedback from your kids.
They're not going to applaud us for setting boundaries or enforcing consequences. It would be so much more fun to fall back into the caregiver role. And how many of us could be found guilty of rolling back a punishment or not enforcing consequences at all at a time when you were just sick of being the bad guy? I'm your mom, the one who loves you and would do anything for you, remember? It's so tempting to just wish our kids would behave and follow the rules, never make mistakes, so we can just keep being the loving, happy version of ourselves.
When I think of my identity as a mom, I don't identify with being a cop, although I know that sometimes comes with the territory. The shift to being a coach is even more uncomfortable. Every once in a while we get to be the caregiver, but more often our kids stop wanting our help.
One of my sons asked me to stop doing his laundry, but then his laundry would pile up in his room because he never got around to doing it. I found myself caught between wanting to respect his autonomy and being proud that he wanted to take care of this chore himself, to on the other hand being annoyed that his room was a disaster with dirty clothes everywhere. Going through the college process was even more stressful.
Here's what I learned. I had a preferred way that my son should go about tackling his applications and jumping through the hurdles of the process, and my son had a completely different version of how it should go. I tried to coach him into seeing the merit of my recommended strategy, which included starting the essays well in advance of the actual submission deadline.
He wasn't interested. No matter how many times I reminded and nagged, he was operating on his own timeline. How am I supposed to be a coach when my child has no interest in my coaching? In fact, there have been many times my boys haven't wanted me to be a caregiver, certainly not a cop, and not even a coach.
They preferred the distant rich aunt model, maybe. You see her on holidays and she'll support you with a large trust account. That kind of model.
Because after all, our kids want so badly to be independent, but it's not like they're supporting themselves. It can feel hurtful. It seems naive.
You wouldn't be the only mother to have said to yourself after being rejected one more time after everything I've done for you. It's confusing to say the least. You can feel like you're walking on eggshells.
You miss the close relationship you once had, even if that was years ago. We blame ourselves as if there's something we could have done differently to avoid this terrible treatment. And it all begs the question, if I've literally built my life around this child, and they don't really want me involved in their life, and they're leaving for college in just a few short months or years, now what? Who am I exactly? Enter the identity crisis.
What is my role? How do I balance being a caregiver, a cop, and a coach, particularly if my child isn't at all interested in my input at times? How do I manage the anxiety of wanting to help my teen and potentially seeing them take risks, or not live up to their potential, and not being able to do one thing about it other than nag, beg, cry, and fight, and do it all again the next day? It feels like such a waste of these last precious years at home with our kid. But remember that our teens may also be falling into the mindset trap of an identity crisis. They're also undergoing a huge life transition, first puberty, navigating adult relationships, higher expectations, and looking ahead to leaving home for the first time.
You might even remember this time yourself. It's scary, stressful, easy to feel insecure. At the same time, our kids are becoming aware of all of these other options in terms of how to live their lives, and they're comparing their life with others, potentially comparing how we parented them in contrast to how other kids were parented.
They may not even know what they want, but they're starting to realize that they are separate from us, and that one day they're going to have to live on their own. Who am I? Our kids are also asking themselves this question. Thinking back to that moment when the therapist suggested that my son was really trying hard to pull away from me.
In my pain and anxiety, I heard her words and I made them about me. I assumed that she meant my son was pulling away because I had done something wrong, and God knows I could find evidence of many times when I'd messed up, gotten to a boiling point, and acted like a cop fueled by panic. Who knows, maybe she was suggesting there was something I'd done wrong.
But even more importantly, what I've come to realize is that my son pulling away was about him. It was about him figuring out who he is, undergoing his own identity crisis. And let me just reframe this for a moment because I don't think having to undergo a transition where you question your identity is necessarily a mindset trap.
I think the trap is when we fight against this questioning, when we close ourself off to the reality that our role and our purpose is changing. Honestly, whether we like it or not, the trap is thinking something has gone wrong. Our kids are looking to form their adult identity, and we're trying to find stable footing in our identity as a caregiver, a cop, a coach, an aspiring consultant, and maybe also a woman with grown children living her own life and fully engaged with a purpose that includes but isn't limited to her children.
We get to think whatever we want to think about our lives, and this transition naturally gives us an opportunity to re-evaluate who we are. How do you want to think about yourself now? This isn't a crisis, it's life. So if you're fighting the shift in identity as your kids grow up, pull away, and eventually leave the nest, this is when we find ourselves in the trap of identity crisis.
So if you're fighting this shift in identity, fighting the opportunity to re-evaluate the way you think about yourself as your kids grow up, and eventually leave the nest, this is when we find ourselves in the trap of an identity crisis. Finding yourself again, finding your purpose, and learning how to navigate your next level role as a mom. Who are you in this next chapter? What kind of mom do you want to be? Do you have the tools to figure it out? This is the focus of my one-on-one coaching program, Mom 2.0. You get to think whatever you want to think about who you are.
Are you open to this change in identity?
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.
