For two years my oldest daughter texted everyday about her divorce, healing, and the challenges she had creating a new life. This came during my bout with serious depression, midlife confusion, several major life changes, managing severe peri-menopause symptoms, and going through a career transition.
Our other three children had plenty of their own stuff during that time and on any given day I might have two out of three of them texting me about big adult type stuff.
Our children grow up and become adults and will experience adult situations just like we do or did. It is something I forgot about until it happened. We get to experience what it is like to be bystanders to these situations and receive texts about how things are going.
We need something to go to that forces us to focus on us and a life apart from children, parenting, and family. A life we can build, pursue, and enjoy apart from our roles as parents. It is a way to ensure our growth as women and that we have a balanced life.
What to do when we are overloaded?
Whatever you do, put the phone down. Try not to obsess over social media as some way of checking on them. Fight the urge to text or message after times when you have been connecting with them a lot and are overloaded with information.
Use discernment to figure out when to follow up with them and when to let them be. It’s like that thing where we have to decide if we let the newborn fuss a bit in their bassinet, or pick them up and try to make it all okay.
For your sake there will be times when you don’t need to follow up. It is not always best that we know all the details, answer all the questions, solve all the problems. It’s not healthy for us or them.
Create self-care routines to help you focus on yourself. We’ve spent a lot of our life focusing on our kids needs, but this is a good time to pull away and focus on ours.
If we don’t pull away now and create more of our own life when will we ever do that. Let their overload push you towards developing a life that is less about parenting and more about being you.
Parenting has a great way of putting us in situations that reveal our beliefs and values and how those fuel our behavior. Dealing with adult children is an opportunity to see what those are and figure out if they serve us and others well.
During a difficult time I had handling the adult situations in my kids lives I noticed my behavior indicated that my beliefs and values weren’t serving anyone well. I got help so I could get myself in a place where I was responding to their lives in a healthy way, wasn’t getting overly involved, and where I could create a life of my own that wasn’t dependent on what was happening to them.
We are going to spend the majority of our parenting years parenting adults. Establishing healthy patterns early on will help us navigate the next and longest stage successfully.
Marcy Pedersen
