THE OPEN NEST - REFRAMING THE EMPTY NEST
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 115.
Hello, my friends. As I was thinking about this episode, I was on a yoga retreat with my mother and my sister. And it was actually so interesting because we talked a lot about stages of parenting.
I have two boys, one a senior in high school and the other going into his sophomore year in college. My sister has two daughters, one in fifth grade and one in seventh grade. And my brother, who wasn't with us, has two sons, one who's two and the other who's going into third grade.
Then on my husband's side of the family, he has three siblings, all with children who are almost all out of college, and many of them are having babies of their own. So in my immediate family experience, I have the opportunity to witness in real time so many different stages and models of motherhood. In the context of my work as a master coach who works with moms approaching the empty nest, I've talked about what I call the empty nest straddle.
That experience that actually is already starting with my sister and her seventh grade daughter. You start to see your child step out of childhood. Their moods become unpredictable.
They start having experiences with friends that are stressful. They grapple with insecurity and fitting in. You start to see that a change is coming.
Of course, at this stage, if your oldest is in middle school, you're definitely not yet thinking about the empty nest. But I've come to realize that the challenges that we often struggle with as mothers, as our kids go from middle school to high school and then college and beyond, the challenges are similar in that we start to realize that we're no longer in control of helping them be safe, happy, and successful. You can find yourself torn between still wanting to help support and guide your kids, really to save them from the pain and the consequences of being unsafe, unhappy, and unsuccessful.
But at the same time, you're grappling with the reality that your kids are going to have to learn how to navigate all of this on their own. And let's be honest, these challenges are a lot about our kids, but it's also about us. What does it mean for you to be a good mom? What's your role? What responsibility do you feel you have to help them be successful? And a question many of us don't even give ourselves permission to ask, who am I as a woman, separate from my role as a mother? What I've found with my clients, interestingly, is that the lessons that we need to learn as we navigate the road through high school and through the empty nest, the lessons I should say that we have the opportunity to learn to break free of the emotional roller coaster we often find ourselves on, are the same.
The conversations I had with my sister over the course of this weekend really reinforced this for me. The challenges we start to face with our kids in middle school only intensify as our kids grow up and increasingly become their own people, figuring out who they are separate from us. I find that the words we use to describe our lives really matter.
Sometimes when I tell people I'm a life coach for almost empty nesters, some will share that they know some people struggle with it, but that they didn't have a problem transitioning to the empty nest. They might even say that they were really excited to enter this new stage and have time for themselves again. For these people, their relationship with what we generally call the empty nest is a positive one.
But for other moms, and frankly, dads too, some of us can dread the empty nest. The meaning and the weight of that phrase, the empty nest, seems to imply a void, something that's missing. I think the reason why the concept of the empty nest straddle is interesting to me is that no matter whether we look forward to the empty nest or dread that transition, every single one of us have to navigate this journey of helping our kids self-actualize and grapple with our role and responsibility in that.
I don't think it's easy for anyone. For sure, the specific challenges each of us face are different based on our kids, based on our own desires and values. But the journey of the empty nest straddle is long.
It lasts even into the time when your kids start having their own kids. How much do you support? How much do you let go? As a coach, I don't think there's one right answer. What I want to help you explore is what is the right balance for you in your life? What do you really need to take responsibility for? How much is your help really needed? And maybe even more interestingly, how might my help actually be holding my teen or adult kid back or impacting our relationship in some way that I don't want? Maybe even holding you back, limiting your potential to self-actualize and embrace the next chapter of your life.
There is no one right answer. There's nothing you should be doing, nothing you have to do. All of this is an invitation for you to explore for yourself.
How can you trust yourself to decide what's best, both for your kids and for your own well-being? I've been thinking about this fluid nature of our relationship with our kids and our relationship with ourselves, taking a long-term view that as mothers, we're going to have a relationship with our kids for a really long time. And actually, when you think about it, you're going to have a relationship with yourself every single moment of your life. So I wondered if we could change the narrative around the empty nest, so that we consider that although the nest might factually be empty at times, in the sense that our children won't be physically in our home, that this phrase, the empty nest, focuses too much on what's missing, rather than the opportunity in front of us or the gift of having the nest in the first place.
In truth, the nest is less empty than it is open. Our kids leave, but they also regularly come back. There's a cycle to our relationship with our kids over the course of our lives with them.
So let's explore that cycle and see what lessons we can learn in the process. In fact, I think there are three specific lessons that each of us have an opportunity to learn to transform our experience of what I'm going to refer to as the open nest. The impact of these lessons is profound.
These lessons will empower you to take control of your emotional well-being throughout this journey through the open nest. And when you think about it, you experience your life through your emotions. So think about the profound impact of creating more peace, joy, and confidence in your life.
I often say that one of the goals of my coaching program, Mom 2.0, is to help you be the best mom you can be. To step into that next version of yourself as a mom and as a woman navigating the road to your next chapter. I want to be clear that being that best version of yourself isn't about specifically what you do, but more about who you're being when you do it.
It's about the feelings you cultivate in your life and the quality of the actions you take from those emotions. So to put it simply, if you feel peaceful, the actions you take with your kids or in your life are likely to be very different than if you feel anxious or angry. And so to me, being that highest version of myself is learning how to take action from those peaceful, confident, loving feelings rather than from anger and anxiety, resentment and guilt.
That is the secret to being the best version of yourself and to you living into the best version of your life. And so this is why, to me, helping women step off the roller coaster of negative emotions that seem to be an inevitable part of raising teens is life-changing. Most of us go through life thinking that the circumstances of our lives need to be in perfect alignment in order to find peace and joy.
And this really is at the heart of the work I do with my clients because the truth is our lives will never be in perfect harmony except for in beautiful, fleeting moments. So if you're waiting for perfection to allow yourself to find peace, you're going to be waiting your whole life. In fact, sometimes we even dread the possibility of pain even when everything in our life is going okay right in this moment.
So with all of this in mind, let's explore the journey of the open nest. It actually starts with us creating that nest. I'd like to start at the very beginning because we don't always appreciate how long we've been practicing the responsibility of keeping our kids safe and happy and helping them be successful.
From the moment this journey of motherhood began for us, it's been our life's work to keep our kids safe, feeding them, changing them, keeping them out of danger. Think about the fact that you did this for 24 hours a day in the beginning of your kid's life. You were also constantly trying to keep them happy.
Their cries were a cue that they needed something from you. So our kids' unhappiness is literally a trigger for us to respond to their needs. Their happiness is also a reward for us.
I'm willing to bet that when your child smiled, your heart melted. Seeing their faces light up with glee and happiness gave you permission to think that everything is okay, even actually that you were doing a great job as a mom. Think about how many milestones of success you've helped them navigate, sitting up, pulling themselves up on furniture, their first steps, their first words.
Think about how much self-actualization happened in your kid's life in those very first months and the first year of their lives, and how much we played such an integral role in their developmental success during that year. Our desire to help our kids be safe, happy, and successful isn't just our job or something we really want. It's actually a well-practiced and, in fact, automatic habit.
Studies show that it takes anywhere from two to eight months to establish a new habit. Well, we've been practicing this habit for 50 to 20 years. So this habit is automatic.
It's natural and automatic as brushing your teeth. And the rewards we get for practicing these habits are immense. We see them achieve big and even small goals, and we're filled with pride and joy, sometimes even greater than any pride or joy we can experience in our own accomplishments.
Think about those feelings of love and gratitude, the thought that what we're doing as moms matter, that we're making an impact on our child's lives. You couldn't think of a more powerful habit loop, with our kids' needs being the trigger, our support of them being the habit, and our own feelings of pride and joy being our reward. So this experience of motherhood has literally tethered us to the nest, tethered us to that responsibility that we feel to help our kids be safe, happy, and successful.
Earlier this spring, we discovered in our yard that a bird had built a nest in a closet in an outdoor shed. I guess the door had been left open for a period of time, long enough for her to create the nest and lay eggs. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, someone had closed the door to the shed.
And so the mother bird was separated from her nest for some period of time before we realized what had happened. So we propped the door open again, and she quickly returned and sat diligently on those eggs. For a long time, nothing happened, and we felt sad for this mom, who was determined to stand vigil over her babies.
Eventually, three out of the four eggs hatched. Her effort was rewarded. And it occurs to me that this instinct to protect our young is an animal basic instinct.
We are biologically designed to continue our species. So whether you look at our desire to support our kids as a habit or a natural instinct, it makes perfect sense that it's hard for us to let it go. So to me, I don't actually think it's useful to tell ourselves it's something we have to let go.
I will always want to help my sons be safe, happy, and successful. It feels like a privilege to me to have that role. But the opportunity we have is to learn how to decide intentionally what support our kids actually need, and how we want to meet that need amidst the changing circumstances of their lives, and to let that be enough.
So back to the stages of the open nest. We go through this building the nest phase, where we quite literally are responsible for keeping our kids safe and happy. This continues as they grow into toddlers and little kids.
Then as our kids get to middle school, the walls of the nest start to permeate a bit. Our kids start to have their own opinions about what makes them happy. It's not as easy for us to influence their moods.
They might even start to take risks, push boundaries. I also remember in middle school hearing often this message that school was preparing our kids for high school. All of a sudden, your kids are taking real classes and getting real grades.
The question of how to help our kids be successful in school starts to feel so much more important and pressing. Up until this point, many of us moms probably felt like we had a say, maybe even some degree of control over helping our kids be safe and happy. Our kids might have even readily gone along with our advice, following our lead in terms of what they should do to be successful.
For those first 10 or more years as a parent, as challenging as those years can be, you kind of think you have some control over the variables that support your kids' safety, happiness, and success. But I want to offer a reality check on that, because although it seemed we had some magic powers to make our kids happy when they were sad when they were little, what actually happened is that our kids trusted us when they were little. We told them, this is happiness, this is how to be safe, this is what you have to do to be successful.
And by and large, they believed us. They trusted us, and so they went along with us to a large extent. And when they didn't, we still probably got our way because we would let them have their tantrum, but then we would reward their return to happiness.
If they broke rules or were unsafe, we might even punish them into compliance. We held all the cards. But then you get to middle and high school, and that deck is redistributed.
Of course, some of this isn't a surprise. I think most of us realize that as our kids grow up, they're going to test boundaries and become their own people. Eventually, they're going to leave the nest and establish their lives separate from us.
But what I don't think we realize is that so much of why this is a challenge for us is because of how we feel. Think about it. If you didn't experience any emotion about your kids' lives, there actually wouldn't be any problem, right? So as much as it's hard and maybe even uncomfortable to hear, consider that the reason the teen years and the transition to the empty nest is so hard is because of you and not your teen.
Now, this isn't to say it's your fault. It's not to say that you shouldn't feel the way that you feel. Your feelings, whatever they are, are 100% valid.
But you experience your life through your emotions. So when you don't feel the way you want to feel, that's when you start to want to change the thing that you think is making you feel terrible. It makes perfect sense.
But it's also why we're all on this emotional roller coaster. I'm going to go into this in much more detail. But let me now get to the first lesson of the open nest.
Number one, you cannot make your child be safe, happy, or successful. This is actually just a fact. Your kids' safety is no longer in your control.
As they grow up, they are increasingly navigating the world without you by their side. They are going to make decisions. Hopefully more often than not, they'll make safe decisions.
But this is not in your control. You might be able to influence them with advice, but only if they take it. You can absolutely set boundaries.
For example, if they're a teen still at home, you can ground them or take away privileges for doing things you've told them not to do. But even when you give great advice and set firm boundaries, you still cannot control their safety. You also can't make them happy if they're not.
This is also a hard one to accept. Our kids' unhappiness is a trigger for us. We don't want them to be unhappy.
But here's the truth. Our kids are going to experience emotions based on how they think about the circumstances of their lives. And you can't control your kids' thoughts about their lives.
No matter how much you tell them to look on the bright side or how many things you do to try to cheer them up, they're only going to be happy if they view their lives in a way that makes them happy. This is not in your control. And finally, their success? It's out of your hands.
You can try to get them to do their homework, study for the tests, go out for the team, practice their instrument, apply to college. You can nag, you can remind, you can beg, you can even establish and enforce consequences. But at the end of the day, your kids have to do the work to create their own success.
You can't do it for them. Now all of this can sound really depressing, but I want you to consider this. Wherever you are on your journey through the open nest, I want you to consider how much responsibility you take for something entirely out of your control.
This is different from wanting your kids to be safe, happy and successful. Of course you do. But what I'm asking you to consider is how much of this do you currently feel is your personal responsibility to guarantee? Now notice how many emotions come up for you on a regular basis when you come against this impossible task of trying to control something entirely out of your control.
I've worked with moms who have kids in middle school who struggle with anxiety over their kids' challenges being unhappy and left out of toxic friendships. I've worked with moms of high school and college students who vape or do drugs and they find themselves unable to let go of anger and anxiety. I've worked with moms whose adult kids are still relying on them for financial support.
They struggle with resentment and frustration, wishing their kids would find independence and success already. Imagine the freedom of separating your desire for your kids to be safe, happy and successful from your responsibility to guarantee that result. Now for many of us, this doesn't seem possible.
So here's the second lesson. You continuing to try to control what's not in your control, you holding on to the responsibility to help your kids be safe, happy and successful, this is actually just making you miserable. Think about any impossible task.
What comes to mind is a dam with hundreds of holes where you're constantly trying to plug the holes, only the water keeps coming. But you keep trying, getting increasingly frustrated and anxious. This is honestly exactly what we're doing to ourselves.
But the truth really is, it's hard for us to see our kids be unsafe, unhappy and unsuccessful. There's nothing that's going to convince me to be happy about any of that or to let go of my deep desire as a mom for my boys to find joy in their lives and thrive in every way possible. It is one of the chief joys of my life to see them in those moments when they're truly living into who they're meant to be.
So what I've come to accept is that there is a part of me that will always be sad or anxious if I think that something's wrong with my boys. This is just my reality. But this is my experience.
I think about my boys' lives and when I think something's wrong, I'm unhappy. But now consider when you think, my child is unhappy and I have to do something to change that. Now there's a whole new layer of emotion, anxiety, worry, fear.
And these emotions stemming from your thought that you're responsible, that you have to fix it. This type of anxiety causes you to try to control something that's not in your control, whatever that looks like for you. Maybe it's trying without success to cheer your kid up.
Maybe it's constantly checking on them, actually trying to get involved in the situation to fix it for them, trying to convince them to do something different. Ultimately, just spinning in your own worry and anxiety about what you wish were different. But here's what's really happening in our minds.
When we think we're responsible for making our kids happy, then we make our kids responsible for making us happy. Think about it. We feel anxious because we think our kids are unhappy and we need to fix it.
So we try to fix it. And ultimately, we won't feel better until our kids feel better. So not only are we creating our own anxiety by taking responsibility for something out of our control, but now we put pressure on our kids to feel better.
What can happen is that this actually puts pressure on our relationship with our kids. My sister shared that her fifth grade daughter was recently upset and my sister did something to try to comfort her. And this beautiful girl told her mom, Mom, you have to let me feel my emotions.
How profound is that? Has anyone ever told you that you should be happier, that you shouldn't be anxious about something? It's invalidating, isn't it? It makes you feel like you're doing something wrong by feeling your emotions. But here we are, well-meaning parents just wanting deeply to support our kids, but now we're needing them to be happy so that we can feel better. This has been one of the most impactful lessons that I've learned as I've raised my boys.
In fact, I almost lost my relationship with my son, in part because I was so caught up in my own beliefs about what his safety, happiness, and success should look like. Every step of the way, I was doing my absolute best. But until I started taking responsibility for my own emotions, I was putting a lot of pressure on my son in a situation where he was already under an incredible amount of stress and unhappiness.
So this brings me to the third lesson. And to recap, so far the lessons have been number one, you can't actually force your child to be safe, happy, or successful. Number two, taking responsibility for this impossible goal is creating even more unhappiness and anxiety for you, and may even be causing you to make your child responsible for your emotional well-being.
And number three, you have the power to decide what you have control over and what you don't. And by doing that, you can take responsibility for your own emotional well-being. So in every situation, you can take a step back and evaluate, what isn't in my control? Remember, that's your safety, happiness, and success.
Then take a moment to acknowledge and validate your feelings about this fact. So for example, you might see that your son is unhappy about a breakup with a girlfriend. You can't control his happiness.
So you might just have to allow your own feelings of sadness, seeing your son unhappy. Or your daughter might be struggling in school. Take a moment to validate your worry about that.
You want her to be successful, and it's hard to see her struggle. Things are going to happen with your teens that you don't like to see. So you can hold space for your own discomfort about that.
Be very clear with yourself that this is your emotional experience. You can't feel your kid's emotions, but you feel yours. Your emotional pain is your responsibility.
Now, consider what is in your control. You can't make your son happy, but how can you support him through his pain? Maybe even ask if there's something you can do, but then respect his boundary if he answers nothing. You can't make your daughter successful, but you can ask if she would like a tutor.
You can set boundaries around how she uses her time, assuming she's still at home. If you discover your child is vaping, you can set boundaries with consequences. If your adult child is still relying on you financially, you can set clear boundaries around how much support you're willing to give and when that support runs out.
None of these responses actually control what your child does or feels, but they're all examples of how you get to control how you show up to the situation. These three lessons are game changers when it comes to creating a relationship with your kids. We offer them unconditional support and take responsibility for our own emotional well-being.
This is a lesson that will impact your relationship through all of the years of your life. But now consider the impact of these lessons for you on every other aspect of your life. First, you don't have control over how anyone in your life thinks, feels, or acts.
This includes your partner, your family, your friends, your co-workers and boss, everyone. You have no control over anyone else. But in the same way, no one else has the ability to control how you think, feel, or act.
So on to the second lesson. Notice how stressful life is when you think you have some responsibility to make other people feel better. And maybe even more importantly, notice how much pain you cause yourself when you think other people or even the circumstances of your life impact your happiness.
Notice how this makes you dependent on other people and your life going exactly the way that you want so you can feel happy. This puts you at the whim of your life, on an emotional roller coaster entirely out of your control. Yet we all do this.
We make other people responsible for our happiness, and it causes us so much unnecessary pain. So how do you escape this pain? How do you step off this roller coaster? Here's the final lesson. You have the power to decide what you have control over and what you don't.
And by doing that, you can take responsibility for your own emotional well-being, holding space for the emotions you need to feel, and letting go of unnecessary pain. But in the same way we can take responsibility for our pain, we can take responsibility for our own happiness. After all, no one else can make you happy, but you.
So wherever you are on your journey in the open nest, consider that although your birds might eventually leave that nest, they will come back. And as they seek their own happiness and success, that invitation is open to you as well. In my one-on-one coaching program, Mom 2.0, I teach the power of taking control of your emotional well-being, allowing you to step off the emotional roller coaster and create more peace, confidence, joy, and fulfillment in your life.
And as I said in the beginning, the quality of the way you show up to your life is determined by who you're being, the emotions you show up with in your life. Think about the impact of leading with peace, with confidence, and unconditional love for your kids and others in your life, but maybe most importantly, unconditional love for yourself. Thank you for joining me on this journey through the open nest, my friends.
You have more power than you think you do. Until next time. 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.
