Life Transitions: When Your Last Child Leaves Home

Sometimes the roles we hold change before we realise how much of our lives have grown around them.

It’s been two weeks now and I can’t get used to the quiet. When I come home, the house looks exactly the way I left it. No washing up left for me. No crumbs on the side. No empty bottle of milk in the fridge. It’s just quiet.

I like the quiet, but this type of quiet doesn’t feel good. It feels strange. When I go to bed, I find myself waiting to hear a key in the door, and then it hits me: my son doesn’t live here anymore.

I would usually cook for him, do what he liked and work around that, but now I don’t need to. Sometimes I don’t bother. I’ll just have tea and toast; that’ll do. It’s the everyday things I notice the most.

It was inevitable.

He’s a young man with a girlfriend and a career. Of course he wants to have his own space.

It’s the natural order of things.

Hopefully I’ve done a good enough job.

Yet… why do I feel like this?

This was me eighteen years ago.

When I look back, my role as a mum was always changing as my son grew. I never gave it a thought… I just got on with it. It wasn’t until later that I realised my whole life had changed too.

For me, being a mum was a combination of things: responsibility, nurturing, protecting and simply being there. I took those responsibilities very seriously. I loved being a mum and I loved taking care of my child. It was a role that was very special to me and, over the years, it had become an important part of who I was.

Perhaps being a single parent intensified some of that for me. I’m not sure. That was simply my experience. What I can see now is that so much of my life had gradually organised itself around being there for my child: the decisions I made, what I prioritised, how I spent my time and, in many ways, where I found a sense of purpose.

And there I was, with my grown-up son having recently left home, feeling lost and empty.

So perhaps those feelings were perfectly understandable after all.

The feelings weren’t there constantly and they didn’t overwhelm me. They came more like waves: sadness, loss and confusion. Sometimes they were stronger, sometimes barely there, and then they would pass. As time went on, the waves became less intense.

I could have filled the space very quickly by keeping busy or throwing myself into looking after other people. Instead, I had to sit with some of what had changed. There wasn’t a shortcut through it. I had to work through it at my own pace and in my own way.

Over time, I had to look at my life. There was nowhere else to go. I could see that parts of me had become hidden behind my role as a mum. Not intentionally. It just happened, bit by bit, as I made decisions that worked for us both, not just for me.

What did I want? What mattered to me? What choices did I want to make for myself?

It felt strangely unfamiliar.

This was the beginning of something different. I was still Mum, still available, but now with more space to consider me too.

Whilst I’ve focused on my role as a mother, perhaps you too are going through changes in your own life and finding them harder to adjust to than you expected.

Not all change is negative. Some changes are wanted, chosen or even exciting, and yet they can still have an impact on us.

When a role changes, we can miss more than the role itself. We can miss the routines that came with it, but also the sense of purpose, pride, usefulness or belonging that it gave us. And when those things have become part of how we see ourselves, it makes sense that adjusting can take time.

Perhaps there is also a part of us that mourns what has changed: the role we had and what it meant to us. That sense of loss is understandable too.

For me, I needed to feel the emptiness and strangeness and allow the emotions that came with them. Eventually, I came to terms with the changes.

I hadn’t stopped being a mum.

It was simply the way I mothered that had changed.

I was still Mum.

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Perhaps you are going through a change of your own and finding it harder than you expected. Sometimes understanding what a change means to us can be an important part of finding our way through it.

If you would like some support to explore what is changing for you, you’re welcome to get in touch or book a free 30-minute consultation.

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