The Follies of Freedom

It’s a really awkward transition in life, when you all of the sudden realize that you can, and you should, put the focus back on yourselves, after raising a family. It’s all new territory. We raised kids for 26 years. (Our four kids are all adults now, ages 20-28) Our primary focus, decision making, and financial commitments were all centered around our family life. And now, just as our adult children are embarking on their young adult lives, we are also embarking on the same kind of freedom of choice, similar to what they are experiencing. And so are our friends and our contemporaries.

It’s fun and inspiring to watch our friends and family and contemporaries in their surprised giddiness, enjoying their new found freedom. It’s enlivening to watch “our people” move to new states, move to different houses, take vacations by themselves, put less focus on their jobs, enjoy rekindled or new-found romances, and focus more on their own re-discovered hobbies and interests. It’s delightful to get to experience our adult children as interesting adult contemporaries with their own lives. It’s a relief to no longer have the everyday family responsibilities, and to no longer have to make choices about other people’s lives, besides your own lives.

In my experience, it takes a while to realize that you are “there.” You’ve crossed the finish line, only to enter into your second lap of life. You feel a little guilty and giddy and amazed and grateful and confused and daunted and relieved. It’s a heady mix.

We parents are so used to taking care of other people other than ourselves, it feels strange to no longer have to do this. (I write this realizing that many of us empty nesters are having to caretake older parents, and sometimes grandchildren and so this freedom of responsibility is not quite over for many. I don’t mean to come across cavalier.) Still, when you realize that you do have more freedom than you’ve had for a long, long time, you almost feel incredulous. You almost feel like you need permission. I have the same feelings now that I had when they handed us our first child, and they wheeled me out of the hospital door to our waiting car. “Really? We can just take this baby home? You’re entrusting us with this whole other human life? Really?” I have the same feelings that my twenty-something kids seem to have, when it dawns on them that my husband and I have no “real say” (nor a desire for a “real say”) in how they choose to live their adult lives. They’re adults. The keys to their lives have been handed back to them. They seem puzzled, pleased and scared. This freedom of choice is exhilarating and a little fearsome and daunting at the same time. If I were a mind reader (and we mothers really are kind of mind readers of our kids, right?), I could see their thoughts as being this: “Oh wow, what if I make a wrong decision? This is all on me now. Where do I even begin?”

Facts are, the best part of this second go-around of freedom in our adult lives, is that we better understand, that there really are very few “wrong” decisions in life. When one of my friends recently purchased a second house, I asked her if she was worried about making the wrong decision. “No,” she said. “If it isn’t right, we’ll just sell it.” Those of us in these middle years, have usually bought and sold at least one home in our lifetimes. We get that there will always be places to live in and different environments to experience. We middle-agers get that even our worst decisions, have provided us with guidance and wisdom to put towards moving forward on our paths. We understand that nothing is truly insurmountable because we have a lot of experiences under our belts, that once seemed insurmountable, until they weren’t. Perhaps the only wrong decisions, are not making any decisions at all.

If you are feeling like me, and you feel like you almost need permission to be a little “self-focused” in this new phase of life, here it is: Permission granted. Great job on raising your family! It is not an easy task. You did well. It is time to celebrate “you”. It is time to love on “you.” It’s time to wind the circle of focus back on to your own life, and to rekindle the parts of you that may have gotten lost or neglected along the way. Go for it! As the favorite Dr. Seuss book goes, that so many of us read to our children, so many times, “Oh baby! The places you’ll go!”

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:

2677. Do you think you can learn something from everyone you meet?

Soul Sunday

Sundays are devoted to poetry on the blog. Poetry is the music and mystery of our hearts. Lately I have been publishing other people’s poetry. With our daughter, who is the youngest of our four children, about to graduate from high school next week, I’ve been keeping the box around my heart, a little more tightly locked. I find poetry to be the most emotional form of writing and I’m not quite ready to unlock the box and let my emotions flow out torrentially, just quite yet. So instead, in the spirit of being on our road trip, I looked up poems about travel and I really liked this one:

Enjoy a beautiful Sunday, friends! Live the poetry of your heart.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Prisoners

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What has you imprisoned? Now you may scoff and say, “Nothing has me imprisoned. I am a free thinker from a free country.” But, if we are honest with ourselves, we all have the things in our lives that imprison us. And usually, we don’t even realize this fact until usually some life crisis or a big change in our lives happen that makes us do a whole lot more self examination than we typically take the time to do, on a daily basis. (This is the hidden blessing of crises. Crises make us get really real with our own selves, if we want to rise out of our crises, like a phoenix from the fire. Otherwise we just succumb to difficulties and wonder “why me?”)

What is imprisoning you? Your financial obligations? Your lifestyle? Your daily habits or even addictions? Your need to please others? Your concern about image and what other people think about you? Your religious/political beliefs that may have been imposed upon you as a child – have you ever really examined these beliefs to see if they really are truly your own beliefs? Your sense of duty? Do your fears about the future, or your regrets about the past imprison you, keeping you frozen and catatonic? Your need to be “right”? Your beliefs about “others” and what they think and do? What about your beliefs about yourself, do they imprison you by making you stay in a certain “mold”, a mold that maybe you never intentionally created, but was fitted for you by someone else, or even by society?

What has you imprisoned? Where do you feel free in your life, and where do you feel stuck? Are the choices which you are making in your life, truly the right ones for you? You are the key, to get out of the prisons of your own making. We all have prisons that we have created for ourselves, and we all have the keys to get out of them. However, it is impossible to escape from a prison that you don’t admit that you are in, in the first place. Don’t be your own jailer. Make the changes in your life, that you need and want to make. These changes are your keys out of prison. Self awareness and courage will bring you to the ability to make changes, which will ultimately bring you to your freedom – your freedom to be the ultimate expression of your own true self.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Land of the Free

Happy Veterans Day!

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Thank you, with deepest sincerity to all veterans and to your families, for preserving our freedom, at any cost. I am honored to send a special shout-out to my father, my father-in-law and my grandfathers (all three deceased), my sister-in-law, my uncle and my cousin for their selfless service to our country.  Thank you, truly. I appreciate, respect, and praise your bravery, courage, and sacrifice, for everything that we hold dear in this country. We are blessed to have citizens that choose to do this service, as a way of life. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.