The Fine Art of Mothering Adult Children

 The Fine Art of Mothering Adult Children (or, how I try to conquer post partum depression after menopause)

Rule #1: Give lifetime unconditional love

Rule #2: Don’t allow that love to be your total undoing

We know we love, cherish, and adore our children, and, if we’ve done it right, we also know that they love us back. We’ve seen them through every milestone, as well as our own with raising children. From the first bath with the first child where we were certain we would drown them, to colic, sleepless nights, endless scares of medical and emotional issues, all ages and stages, getting them to school, through school and all that that entailed to ensure that they had a better than average chance that they could not only succeed in this insane world we live in, but be able to be happy and thrive in it. As hard as it could be, there were also those amazing moments of pure grace, when our children threw their arms around our neck and nuzzled in as if that were the only safe place they would ever know. The early years of confiding in us their fears and joys, and actually looking at us like we must also be the smartest person they will ever know. The achievements, the heartbreaks, the letdowns and the triumphs…we lived all of those with them, for them, and in most cases a few moments were added or subtracted from our own lives because of them. Sometimes we thought the wonderful highs could get no higher, or we doubted that we’d be able to survive the lowest of the lows. But we did, because our love truly is unconditional, even when unconditionality is not always what we get in return.

So what do we do with these children that we have loved and raised and hoped and prayed for every minute of our own life since we knew they were to be…when they become our adult children? Is that mothering switch we didn’t necessarily know we had so firmly inside us until they switched it on, even before birth, one that can now be turned off as easily as they would sometimes like it to be? How do we always know the appropriate distance now, the right word to say at the right time (is there really ever a right time?). We suddenly feel like we must become the best juggler in the circus, or tightrope walker, or balance beamer. And depending on which way we turn, lean into, or fall, we can either be saved by the net or plunged into the abyss. We become gamblers playing Russian Roulette, with the risk of all parties getting hurt. Or we feel emboldened, at our own peril as times, to damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. Because that’s what our mothering switch, despite the times we’d like to briefly turn it off ourselves, guides us to do. It stays on because it’s a connection we’ve made with our internal electric company, to keep the lights burning for as long as we’re here loving. But what we wish for now, with these amazing and wonderful adult miracles in our lives, is for them to understand our ampage, to respect our capacity, and allow us, here and there at least, to be the generators we’ve always been, even as we try so very hard to respect their want and need to navigate their own capacity.

What is our role moving forward as we try to figure out the rest of our own lives as adults? Parent, friend, confessor, mediator, emotional guide, lifeboat? To what extent are we those things, and more, to them? And when we are in need, who do WE go to?

Taking this journey together, and sharing our own stories can hopefully lead us to a better understanding of the role we want to play now as women, as moms, wives, friends, siblings…people on this earth who are trying to get it right, or at least as right as is humanly possible, without losing our own sense of selves, and ultimately, our own happiness and well being.

Our first topic together….Nurturer in Chief. Stay tuned.