As parents we create boundaries and make a lot of rules for our kids. We do this to keep them safe and help them stay on a path that will hopefully lead to them becoming healthy productive adults. At the same time, we make rules for ourselves. We don’t necessarily communicate them, but they become engrained in our daily life.
There is a time to go to bed, list of places we visit, amount of money we spend, amount of time we will stay out on a work night, types of movies we will watch, food we will eat, and activities we will participate in. We self-regulate for the sake of maintaining tight schedules, to focus on growing careers, please others, maintain active memberships, and to appease the list of expectations we are carrying around.
“For Dante the loss of nearly everything he held dear saved his life. How? Because it forced him to rethink everything he thought he knew.” –Rob Dreher
If we’ve lived on autopilot long enough chances are a lot of our life is routine. We wake up, go to work, head home, rest, and repeat. Maintaining routines helped us get through raising the kids and getting things done. Once they leave, however, there is space which can be an opportunity to do something we haven’t done in a while—see our lives.
Our Midlife Crisis Saved Us
We got lucky in that as the first two kids left home, we became severely disillusioned with our life. My husband suffered from severe burnout at work, became depressed, and generally unhappy with his entire life. It was hell, especially when paired with my 6–8-year trek through perimenopause and symptoms like depression, rage, brain fog, and confusion. I was also navigating a career transition, returned to college to get an MBA, was dealing with empty nest grief, and had been unhappy for so long I had no idea why.
The situation forced us to find relief as the status quo wasn’t working so we began to rethink our entire lives. We started where we were by trying new things. This required us to break the rules we had created for ourselves, like we only do certain things. Rules we didn’t know existed and didn’t serve us anymore.
As we made minor changes this opened our minds to bigger things. We made BIG AUDACIOUS goals. This included selling the house we raised the kids in, moving across the country, changing jobs, and creating a new life. We had to break people’s expectations to accomplish this and our vague idea of what our life together would be like as we grew older.
“When the pain of sitting still becomes greater than the pain of moving on, wonderful changes can occur.”—Charles Dickens
The Rules That Need Broken
Vague ideas about what’s next. I know there are a lot of you who have a clear plan for their life after the kids leave. We didn’t. I’m not sure we ever discussed what life would be like, yet I had an assumption, and it was challenged the day my husband said I want to move near an ocean community. It was a moment that could have broken us, but I let my assumption be challenged, gave the idea time to marinate, and in time adopted it wholeheartedly. We achieved our goal two years ago and it was worth it.
You don’t have to abandon your morals, faith, or sense of right and wrong to reinvent your marriage, but it might require looking at things differently. We didn’t drink while raising the kids, but as they started leaving, we were ready for some wine, an occasional cocktail, and enjoying dinner at the bar. We didn’t lose ourselves, but we tested and tried new things in our daily life. Getting your life off autopilot can be painful at first, but well worth it if you find yourself in the process.
Expectations and assumptions. If you are over 50 you know darn well that everyone has expectations of you. It could be your parents, siblings, your adult children, or an employer. Someone is expecting you to do something and if you want to reinvent things in a way that reflects who you truly are then it’s going to require you don’t meet someone’s expectations.
Navigating the empty nest with your spouse can be a difficult time. It might require one or both of you to make some changes, break some unspoken rules that have you on autopilot, like this is what we do every night, every weekend, and forever. Creating a new life requires change, but the pain of doing so can be well worth it, if the end result is living a great life.
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Marcy Pedersen
