This is for my “girls”… all the moms out there who are staring down an Empty Nest.
This one hurts. It’s no fun having an empty nest!
It’s supposed to hurt, but knowing that doesn’t help.
Nothing helps.
It hurts. Period.
It means we’re shifting. We’re no longer the women we used to be.
And that’s ok.
It has to be ok.
One of our biggest fears, I think, is that we’ll find ourselves feeling alone in our own home. The home where our children played with reckless abandon. We fed them. We coddled them. We played with them.
We kissed knee scrapes.
We wiped away tears.
We told them everything’s going to be all right.
And now, it’s time to tell ourselves that very same thing…
Everything’s going to be all right.
But for the moment, it’s not.
A baby is leaving. I know, I know… they’re not babies anymore.
But they are.
And a room will be empty.
There will be reminders everywhere and we’ll burst into tears without warning.
It hurts. And…
Everything’s going to be all right… but only if you let it.
You get that, right?
It starts with fear: “Who am I if I’m not in “mother mode.” It becomes a crisis of identity for so many of us.
It certainly happened to me. When my oldest daughter went off to college she was only an hour’s drive away. She was a mess. I had to focus all my energy in helping her with the transition. I had no time to absorb what was happening… until I saw… the empty bedroom.
Ugh.
When my son went off to a college that was a plane ride away(!) I was crushed. He’s more of the strong/silent type. When my husband and I got to the airport to go home after dropping our son off, he sent me a two-word text that nearly brought me to my knees:
Come back, Mom.
I almost went back. It took everything I had in me to not go back. To get on that plane. To go…
Home. To the house that didn’t feel the same.
I would drive by our golf course (he’s an avid golfer) and would burst into tears. My daughters were worried that their mama was losing it.
I was losing it.
I leaned heavily on my fellow life coaches. Back then, I was fairly new to life coaching and couldn’t see what I couldn’t see (oy, what I couldn’t see!) and even now, as my youngest prepares to go back to her second year in college, I can feel the now-familiar lump in my throat rise up.
I used to hate that lump.
Now I simply expect the lump.
Hello, lump! I knew you’d be back again.
I honor the lump.
The lump means I’m human. The lump means I love being a mom.
Oh, how I love being a mom!
The lump means I’m feeling a loss that is very real, and that I need to take care of myself. I need to respect that this is a time of transition for her and for me and that even though it HAS TO HAPPEN, I can still feel sad about it. And I can trust that I will feel better.
It’s a process. We have to allow the process, or we stay stuck in sadness.
That sucks.
Let’s not stay stuck. Anywhere. Ever. Especially not in an empty nest.
Let’s have the guts to move through this natural life change with grace.
And then let’s use our grace to allow new, unexplored glory opportunities to come into our lives.
Taking care of YOU is going to require some grit. Make sure you have someone who can walk you through troubled waters, back to calm.
Back to who you are… who you’ve always been: a woman, with a girl inside her that still needs you attention. Mother her. She needs you more than ever now.
When you know how to move through life’s transition stages with guts, grit, and grace, there will be glory days ahead.
Believe.
With arms wide open,
Lin xo
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