Talking today about the gig of motherhood. If we do it right, we’re going to end up with children who leave and make their own ways in the world. It’s the most all-consuming thing for parents and…..then it isn’t anymore. Here we are in our empty nests contemplating what it’s all meant/felt like.
Why did you want to have kids?
B: Wasn’t b/c of being drawn to babies or playing with dolls or b/c I thought Bob and I were such great people we needed to add to the gene pool. Wasn’t b/c I thought I’d make an amazing mother. In fact, I had a lot of trepidation b/c although I could mimic positive memories of being mothered, I couldn’t actively ask questions b/c I had no grandmothers or mother and not a very safe/close MIL.
If you come from a good family and had a good childhood, some part of you might yearn to replicate that. Is the converse true? The closeness and fun of family.
R: My mom reminded me that I said I wasn’t having kids when I was a teen. (There are plenty of kids who need homes! Pregnancy seemed impractical!) Wisely, she let that go and didn’t try to convince of the creation mandate in Genesis 1-2. 🙂 So, David and I married and we weren’t in too much of a hurry to have kids. We didn’t really want to until… we did. It was just “feeling” that it was time. I had no theology of what marriage was for (dominion mandate and filling the earth) and was raised in the later years of the sexual revolution where birth control was assumed, not questioned.
Did your expectation line up with reality?
B: did I HAVE expectations? In the early years (first year), there was so much unexpected time to fill. I expected challenge, but I didn’t grasp the depth of a baby’s need. Certainly wasn’t prepared for how deeply my child’s pain would affect me. We had a lot of fun, and I enjoyed my children, still do. I so loved watching them at each stage and how they grew into their own individual selves separate from me—the miracle of that.
R: I expected babies to be tricky, but it was waaaaay harder than I thought. I expected my life to change (a baby would now need me 24/7), but it was totally turned upside down. I wanted to stay home with my kids, but the days were looooong. Reading Nancy Pearcey’s Toxic War on Masculinity and seeing how the nuclear family thing we’re doing right now is a blip on the radar of history put words to what I was feeling. I thought it was really odd and weird and unhelfpul to have these little people and then send the husbands out into the world, leaving the moms behind. I kept wondering, How did we get here? Remember talking about creating a compound to do life together?
Pearcey: we have to go back to the Industrial Revolution, because before that, men worked alongside the family all day, their wives and kids on the family farm, the family industry, the family business. So, the social expectation on men focused on their caretaking role. In fact, most books on parenting were written to fathers, not to mothers, because men did, in fact, spend as much time with their children, and their sons were practically apprentices all day in the father’s craft or a business. So, what happened with the Industrial Revolution? It takes work out of the home, and for the first time, men are not working with people they love and have a moral bond with, their family members. Instead, they’re working in competition with other men. And this is when the language started to change. People started to protest that men were losing their caretaking role. That they were becoming individualistic, egocentric, greedy, and acquisitive to use the language of the 19th century and turning their job into an idol. And so, if we want to focus on fixing the problem, we have to ask where it started. And that’s where it started is when men became separated from their family. And that does show where the solution has to lie. Can we reconnect fathers with their families, even in an industrial age?
you started to have factories and offices and financial institutions and universities and the state. And people began to argue that these large public institutions should operate by scientific principles by which they really mean value-free. Which is what we hear today, right? Don’t bring your private values into the public realm. And since it was men who are working in that public realm and who are getting that secularized education, they did actually become secular before women did. So this was part of the problem, too, is that they began to be less bound in conscience to biblical principles. And they started following with secular ideas of masculinity. And you know what happened in the 19th century? There was a huge increase in crime, gambling, drinking, prostitution, the number of brothels mushroomed.
Kelly Corrigan wrote that “Before our children become themselves, when they’re more physical than emotional or intellectual, we claim them piece by piece…” the way he walks like his dad, her curly hair like mom’s, his dimples like his granddad.
What did we claim in our kids?
Temperaments? Traits? Tendencies?
This is so common…almost immediate in the delivery room. What IS it about us that we do this? Then it’s all thru life. It’s what makes for conflicts sometimes in older kids…when we recognize tendencies in our kids that we don’t love in ourselves or that have caused us issues and we try to quash them.
Is it a pride of creation?
You’re just like your father! The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree… truisms. But this can apply to negative things that are passed generationally. “It runs in the family” we might say (Mental illness, alcoholism, divorce, promiscuity) by way of explanation or excuse.
It runs in the family until it runs into ME and I break that cycle and do some healing. If I don’t deal with my ___________, my child will.
Do you think these sorts of attributions (pos and negative), the way we search our children for ourselves and their relatives, is healthy or wrong-headed?
We’re so wired for narrative and uncertainty is hard…maybe we’re just tagging stuff in our kids because we’re trying to make sense of them in some way? But maybe their behavior or their athleticism or whatever is just uniquely them and it doesn’t have to be attached to me or someone else. Does it add pressure to them when we do this?
First time your kid did something you weren’t aware of?
For a good stretch of years, we’re so attuned to every input in our child’s life…. We know what they eat, what they wear, what they do all day, when they’re sad or if they’ve had a great day, who their friends are…. All of it.
There comes a time, tho, when you have a babysitter or they go to preschool or daycare or kindergarten and they have experiences and know things outside of you.
B: I remember thinking this was so odd at the time because we’d been SO connected. This is when that cord starts to fray just the tiniest bit…and it was cool b/c I could see them stretching but also a little alarming because wait! I was the knower!
R: I was relieved when we did preschool and some of the skills we’d been working on, like potty training, were reinforced. But I was unsettled when the teacher reported that H had hit another kid. His version of the story was very different (she hadn’t seen the beginning) and to this day, he sticks to it!
Teachers and others who come into your child’s life can discover/tell you things about your child that you don’t know and haven’t seen yet. Your child tutors others when she’s finished with her work. He’s a really gifted writer. It’s an odd feeling when someone ELSE is drawing conclusions or observes something about my child that I hadn’t known. That can be good or scary, depending on what it is they tell you!
It’s pretty common for your child to act differently outside the home than inside it…. Your terse, moody 14 year old grumps around and gives you heavy sighs if you ask them to do something, but someone in youth group tells you how helpful and kind they are. HUH?!
It can be a little unnerving. How did I miss that? You want to think you’re able to know/perceive everything about your child. Sometimes this can create a knee-jerk parental defensiveness like if a teacher gives serious feedback (your kid cheated or some other behavior). You can’t BELIEVE they’d do that. Or another parent calls you to say, hey, I thought you’d want to know…. And you have to question what it is you thought you knew about your child. Drinking? My kid knows better than that. And yet….
Another part of letting go…. The thread frays a little more…. Yours isn’t the only correct impression!
When they’re home, even when they’re in high school and so busy with friends, school, jobs, and all the things, you still have access to them. Not as MUCH. You definitely don’t know everything that’s going on emotionally like you did when they were 3. But they do sleep in their same bedroom and raid the pantry.
At some point….they leave.
There’s this whole part of that final year, and sometimes even earlier in their junior year, when you see it all unfolding in slow motion. You start to feel an anticipatory grief because you know it’s coming.
A lot of parents at this point start to feel that sense of urgency—did I tell you everything? Did I teach you all you need to know? We STARE at them like we’re trying to memorize them, somehow storing up all the details because it’s coming, we know it is. The end of the gig. And the kids feel it too so they may pull away even more. It’s a brutal cycle.
That’s the job. It’s like the greatest and best marriages actually will end with the death of one person. Your vows stuck, they lasted until death us do part.
B: I wanted them to see us excited for them, confident in them, cheering for them. I certainly didn’t want to send them off worried for our mental states or the condition of our marriage while they’re trying to navigate classes and roommates and career choices. So you hold a lot of that in.
R: I questioned the ritual of college and leaving home. Why do we do this? Is this what is best for them? What do other cultures do? Kind of like my questioning the SAHM thing with dad leaving for work all day. I was grieving. David was grieving. Houston was grieving. It felt weird for us to only have 3 people in the home. Then with H, it was like the end of my career. It WAS the end of my career. You reflect on what you did well and what you missed and how you could have done things better. I think I cried once a week for a year.
In most northern and western countries, young people left home on average in their early twenties, while in southern and eastern states the average age when leaving home was in the late twenties or early thirties.
But then, it’s there and you’ve come to this EXIT RAMP. You’ve spent 18 yrs with this child, invested everything in him or her. It was a fantastic wild ride of a life that shaped them and you and your marriage in ways you hadn’t fathomed. It’s been a BEAUTIFUL and HARD and TRANSFORMATIVE chunk of your LIFE. The senior slide shows….ack. It was all gorgeous, even the hard parts. And now it’s done—this part at least. That’s why parents catch their breath at graduation and college drop off and a little bit all thru that last year when they’re at home. Even if they’re ready and excited for it.
Read COLLEGE BOUND essay
Have your moment. Have it with them, even, if they’ll allow it. Acknowledge the end of something.
So…that part is over. You are now SOMETHING ELSE to them. Your role has been changing all along but now there’s no denying it. They love you but they’re not sharing it all with you anymore.
HS students gripe b/c they’re constantly asked the dreaded questions: what are you doing after graduation? What are you majoring in? ….
PARENTS forevermore get the question “how are your kids?”
Your answer now is generally based on the last update you got from them…b/c you don’t get to know everything.
BTW this can be a tricky question for a lot of parents, and I kind of wish we’d abolish it like we all know not to ask a woman when she’s gonna have kids or when she’s due (if we don’t know she’s pregnant). It can be an invisible minefield because A LOT of parents of teens and young adults are dealing with heavy, heavy things in their kids’ lives. They’re quiet about it to respect their child’s privacy and b/c most people don’t know what to do with that information. (Well, our oldest is in rehab right now and our youngest is being viciously bullied.)
It can be a lonely place. You want to be able to say all the great things, and you brace for the blame… when it comes to adult children, VERY LITTLE of the blame OR the credit belongs to the parents.
So they’re gone and it’s time to back off, take your hands off the wheel.
–don’t text throughout the day (let them figure out how it’s actually going)
–leave them alone
–don’t’ have to respond immediately to their texts either (it’s actually helpful for them to see you busy with other things)
# DAYS with PARENTS
Age 1- 365
Age 18 – 35
Age 30 – 12
Age 40 – 5
THE NOW WHAT FEELING
Now’s the time. Focus outward – what new ministry can you do?
Focus inward: get that degree; learn a new skill; join some groups; try the thing you always wanted.
Dr Marcus Warner: Infant, Child, Adult, Parent, Elder… We hit the elder stage! have time to devote to the community around us.
Recognize your kids are doing that partly too. Your influence with your kids isn’t ZERO but it’s just wayyyy less. Emphasize to them how to find good people for maturity/guidance… (professors, mentors, community). A really good friend. I was doubling down on praying for them to find really solid friends and influences. Still do. I was acknowledging that I just wanted them to HAVE those things and they didn’t have to come from ME.
I just want them to have great friends who will lower them thru the roof if needed. I don’t want them to be alone and adrift and without an anchor…and not calling us.
Avert your Gaze off your kids…
Not sure dads feel this same way? Or maybe with the same intensity? From their POV they’re getting their wife back. Maybe that’s healthier than some of the lamenting that we as moms do? I’m not sure MY mom felt our leaving in the same way…the role of parents wasn’t as intense and all-encompassing as it seems to be now. We identify so much with it that it rocks our foundations more?
Do you define yourself as a parent anymore?
Not responsible for them
Don’t need to have an opinion/advice about everything
They can share with me what they want
Always willing to help if asked/able
Not necessarily even their emergency contact anymore
Still pray and intercede
What do you expect from them?
Hope they come around
Hope they share with us
Hope someday they maybe have a hand in taking care of us if we need it
Love it when they call and share but we don’t mandate it…obligation isn’t the vibe I’m interested in.
Renee: I think there is something to be said for obligation… helping aging parents. Calling and checking on them, etc. It’s interesting to see how it plays out when your kids are grown. What do they do to maintain the relationship?