I was flipping through my emails this morning, and I came across writer/podcaster Kelly Corrigan’s quick summary of her conversation with Aliza Pressman, who is an author and a counselor and a parenting expert. So, I went down the rabbit hole of watching various interviews and videos Aliza Pressman had made on The Today Show and on her Instagram, filled with excellent parenting tips, and my overall impression was 1.) Aliza makes many practical, useful, sensible, effective suggestions and 2.) Thank heavens that our four kids are grown and I don’t have to frantically try out any of her suggestions! We don’t even have grandchildren yet. Yes, we do have three somewhat unruly, misbehaved dogs. (My daughter kept chiding us, earlier this summer, that we simply weren’t going to believe how extremely well-behaved the darling dogs of London are, running around leashless in Hyde Park only because they listen to every command their owners give to them, every single time. Yes, it seems that even English dogs have better manners than their American counterparts. I have always wholly admitted that we were much better at raising kids, than we were at raising dogs.)
I have reached that early empty nest realization that my younger self (and my husband’s younger self, and my friends’ younger selves) were total badasses. Parenting is hard! I was cleaning out ancient emails the other day and I found an email which I had sent to a family member, trying to schedule some time to get together one weekend. With four kids at home, balancing four crazy schedules of school and sports and activities, the schedule read like something you’d expect from a rock star’s world tour, or a dignitary visiting a foreign land and trying to make the utmost of the short time allotted. And I sounded so calm in my email. Just reading the schedule exhausted me. But my former self seemed to take it all in stride.
I loved raising my family. However, I also love that this mission is completed. Parenting is hard work: physically, mentally, and particularly emotionally. There is no job in the world that you don’t beat yourself up more for not doing it “right.” When you are actively parenting, you are on call 24/7. Even when we were on vacation, when the kids were little, it often seemed like we had just packed up our life of parenting, and unpacked it (and unpacked, and unpacked, and unpacked) in a different location.
The thing about parenting is that it always carries a low level of “guilt.” Even now I feel “guilty” writing that I am relieved that my “raising my kids days” are complete. I see many people pining away for the days when the kids were little. I’m not completely sure what that pining is about. Is it loss of our own youth and vitality? Is it stuck in regrets of wishing we had done things differently, or that circumstances had gone differently? Is it losing too much of our identity in our roles as parents, that we feel a loss of who we are currently? Is it feeling a loss of control, and loss of great amounts of time and insight, into the separate lives of our now adult children?
I feel kind of fortunate that I don’t feel too sad that my active parenting phase is over. My friend loves to repeat the adage, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Be happy that it happened.” Thankfully, I believe that I am a “moving forward” kind of a person. That is not to say, that I don’t ever get caught up in the grips of nostalgia from time to time, or that I don’t ever look in the mirror and wish that I could bring that 30-something body and energy back into being, but overall, I’ve plunged fully and enthusiastically into each new phase of my life, and I intend to do the same with this empty nest phase that I am just wading into now. Life is a journey forward. I know that someday, in my quiet, elderly years, I’ll look back at what my empty nest emails/texts/communications looked like, and I will be in awe of my empty nest self, and everything that she experienced and completed and learned in that phase of her life. I will think to myself, “She (and her husband and her friends) sure were badasses” and then I’ll keep being my badass elderly self until it really is all over.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:
1591. Do your goals and dreams energize you – or exhaust you?