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Empty Nest parents feel an intense loneliness when their children leave home. For Empty Nest moms, this loneliness is further intensified because of the strong bond between mother and child predating birth. If you are a stay-at-home mom who has found your primary identity in being a mother, the loneliness can at times feel overwhelming.

If I am honest, I’ll admit that I look forward to evenings and weekends when my husband is home and I dread Monday mornings when he begins his work week. Sometimes I ask myself, “What’s going on here? Am I feeling separation anxiety like a two-year old?”

In a sense, I am feeling separation anxiety – the separation from the ones I’ve been close to, not only physically but also emotionally.

It had never been my dream to become a stay-at-home mom; as a single woman, I had groomed myself to be a career woman. I stayed home to raise children because our circumstances required it and because I wanted our children to have the best care. The stay-at-home mom identity isn’t the one thing I was holding onto. Then what is that one thing, or more than one thing, that I have lost? What might be the new thing or new things that could replace what has been lost?

Many adults who have suffered the loss of close relationships, because of the death of a spouse or because of divorce, feel a profound loneliness that sometimes seems inconsolable. Becoming Empty Nest parents has a similar effect but offers hope for a new, improved, and adult-to-adult relationship with our children, if we can move through the stages of grief without getting stuck in our mourning for the loss of what was that we cannot welcome the gift of what is to come.

1. Journal about your losses. In order for you to begin your journey outward, you need to begin your journey inward. Look inside your emotional landscape and journal about your losses. Be very honest with your emotions and allow yourself to grieve. It’s OK to cry like a little 2-year old when you feel the loss of that closeness with your son or daughter. Feelings, especially grief, must be processed so you don’t end up with the negative consequences of unprocessed grief e.g. psychosomatic symptoms later in life, and unhealthy coping habits.

2. Name the one most important loss. When I reflect on the losses I suffered after our children left home, I realize that losing the closeness with our children is an important loss but not the most difficult loss. The most costly and difficult loss to me is the loss of meaning and purpose. Parenting had kept me engaged and given me meaning and purpose. Now it is a new season in my life: I need to redefine my purpose and mission and find new expressions for them.

3. Get to know yourself. As women raise children, there is a part of us we put on the shelf because we make parenting a high priority. If you go into the attic now, you will find memorabilia that are symbols of those parts of you that have been shelved and have collected dust over the years. It is time to go to the attic and discover those parts: dreams you have always wanted to pursue, skills you have wanted to acquire, talents you might want to explore and develop, and projects you are just dying to begin and complete. This attic is within you. Give yourself the freedom to explore.

4. Take an inventory of your close relationships. In North America, most families are small and so you can count your close relationships with one hand. When children leave home, the number of close relationships gets smaller (until your children are ready to move back into a close relationship with you as confident adults). This is a time when you have the freedom to nurture other relationships – reconnecting with your siblings and old friends from college, and building new friendships by getting involved with groups.

5. Seek ways to meet your personal needs. When you move out of your role as a parent, you also move into a new relationship with yourself. Get to know your deepest needs and learn how to go about meeting these needs. Coping with loneliness is also about crafting a new self-identity and learning to relate to your “self” in a brand new way. Until and unless this growth takes place, you may join hundreds of social groups and still feel lonely. As you take the courage to explore and develop this new “you”, you also gain confidence in reaching out to others. If you take initiative to connect with others, you will never feel disconnected or lonely.

What are some circumstances that seem to intensify your loneliness as an Empty Nester? If you sit down to journal during these occasions, what would you write? How have you been dealing with your loneliness since your children left home? What have you discovered about yourself in the process?

Please feel free to ask me a question by clicking on the button “Ask Me A Question” in the sidebar.

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Grieving is one of those life skills I do quite well but yet have to master. And becoming an Empty Nest mom has certainly given me plenty of opportunities to practice the skill.

The Elisabeth Kubler-Ross model of grief names 5 stages of the grieving process.

1. Denial – “I’m just fine.”; “Well, that’s just the way life is!”; “This cannot possibly be happening to me!”
2. Anger – “Why me? It’s not fair!”; “If only my husband has not done XYZ, this would not have happened.” The person recognizes that denial cannot continue, but resorts to anger as a coping response. This causes the person to be vulnerable to prolonged bitterness, resentment, envy and jealousy.
3. Bargaining – “I’ll do whatever it takes to get a few more years…” The person will bargain for a few more years of life when faced with a terminal illness, or for the young adult child to live close by when the child is being launched from the nest. The person is not ready to accept the inevitability of the loss.
4. Depression – “I miss my child who has just left home. I’ve lost all my joy. I don’t want to do anything.”; “I’m going to die in six months anyway. Why bother with anything?”; “Since my son moved out, I’ve been crying every day. Going out with friends? I haven’t done that for months.”
5. Acceptance – “It’s going to be okay. I think I can move through this.”

After I launched our two children, I realized I was not as ready to be an Empty Nest mom as I thought I was. There was so much coming at me all at once that it took quite some time to sort out all the causes of my grief. I could not begin to grieve well until I know what I am grieving about. Becoming aware of the causes of my grief is like a spotlight that shines on my path. I began to know where I was going.

I was grieving not just for the separation (the main cause of grief for most Empty Nest moms), but also for the traumatic process of separation, the shattered dreams for my children (you may gather by now that our children have engaged in some self-destructive behaviors), and the projected challenge of rediscovering my self-identity after my promotion to be an Empty Nest mom.

Finishing my days without knowing what my children have been up to, how their work days go, and who they are hanging out with is something I have come to accept. After all, that is the reality of the Empty Nest. I have also come to accept the fact that my children are not going to live my dreams for them; instead, they must now dream their own dreams and chart the course of their own lives. Indeed, becoming an Empty Nest mom also means unleashing my children from my dreams for and expectations of them. Perhaps what has caused me the most profound grief, and continues to do so, is the amount of time it has taken to recover or rediscover my self-identity.

This revolves around the question: “Who am I now apart from my children?”

To answer this question, I have to move through the stages of grief. I have to say goodbye to the loss of my parenting role and to my identity as a mother. I also have to resist the temptation of just returning to the old identity I had before my children were born. To just thoughtlessly retrieve and hold on to my old identity is another form of denial. It is denying the fact that I am no longer the same person I was before my children were born. It is denying the gift of transformation: that I am now a new person in the making.

This is about mourning the death of something old and creating the space for something new. This is a psychological tomb that also serves as the psychological womb. The old must die so the new can be born.

What are the causes of your grief? If you don’t know all the causes, what could you do to discover or uncover these causes? Who are the resource people who could facilitate this process? A therapist? A grief support group? A life coach?

Please feel free to ask me a question by clicking on the button “Ask Me A Question” in the sidebar.