Part 1

Beyond the Mommy Years: How to Live Happily Ever After... After the Kids Leave Home
by Carin Rubenstein Ph.D.

Thirty million mothers between 40 and 60 years old are about to face childless households for the first time in decades. For some women, it is a lonely and confusing time; but for the vast majority, it's a journey of joy and discovery.

Through intensive and wide-ranging original research, author Carin Rubenstein reveals how and why some mothers thrive and others do not. She breaks the post-motherhood launch down into three stage - grief, relief, and joy. If a woman makes it through to the final stage, friendships blossom, work thrives, and she develops a renewed sense of confidence and well-being. While in many instances, increased time together hastens the end of a struggling marriage, most women discover their relationships improve when children leave.

Beyond the Mommy Years offers fascinating research, helpful advice, and amusing anecdotes to the millions facing this uncertain but potentially enriching stage of life.

I wrote this book to convince myself that my life wasn't over after my children left home. Here's what I discovered: most of us will learn not only to live with our children's absence but to love it.

As I began this book, I was living through the very early stages of adjustment to my newly empty, newly child-free house. Even with my husband around, it felt very empty, very quiet, and very, very clean.

In fact, it felt completely unnatural, like an unhaunted house on Halloween, an undecorated home on the holidays. It was disorienting and upsetting, but also strangely wonderful.

I was living my life feeling a mysterious mixture of both loss and gratification, a stage of life that has no real name. Indeed, "empty nest" hardly describes the magnitude of the changes I was undergoing and seems inadequate to explain what this stage of life is about. A close friend told me recently that she doesn't like the phrase "because it sounds too much like 'emptiness.' "

And, pardon me, but the nest is far from empty just because the kids are gone. After all, my husband and I are still here, and we're the ones who started the nest, built and feathered it, and paid to fix the water heater and the boiler and everything else in the nest. So to call it empty is grossly inaccurate.

I'm still here, so please don't call my nest empty. My wallet is certainly empty, but not my house!

Still, during the first few weeks after my son left home, I felt a sense of loss as I looked at both of my children's empty bedrooms. I missed them, I missed their physical presence, I missed their "being-hereness." I grieved for their absence, but also for the loss of my role as a fulltime mother. A friend says that since her three children moved out, she feels a kind of phantom-limb pain, a persistent ache at their absence. She can't get over the realization that she made career decisions based on the fact that she was a mother and wanted to be available for her children. But, it turns out, her situation wasn't permanent, she says. "I thought this was for keeps, but no, this is a rental," she explains, referring to her children's presence in her life.

That expresses the problem, exactly. At the time it was happening, we felt as if it would last forever, but everyday motherhood does not last. Our time with our children is borrowed, leased, rented out to us, and there comes a point at which we have to realize that it's mostly over. And, as a sociologist pointed out to me recently, mothers will know their children for much longer as independent adults than they will have known them as dependent children.

Think about that. Your child is a child for barely eighteen years; but your grown child is an adult for decades. So we have to prepare ourselves to be mothers of adult children for the rest of our lives.

This is the reason that the children's departure signals a new stage in life for moms, a transition from the intensive-mothering stage to the occasional-mothering stage. It's the official end of the mommy years. But while it signals a conclusion of one stage, it's the beginning of another very important one.

It's the beginning of a time of life that is not about the children; it's about us.

It is about facing life as more than mother, as after mother, as beyond mother. It's about what we do with ourselves and the next part of our lives, the emancipated stage of motherhood, the third adulthood.

First there was adult life with no children, which began on our eighteenth or twenty-first birthday. Next came parenthood. Finally, once again, there is life with no children at home.

It's déjà vu all over again.

Only this time, we're not the ones doing the leaving - we're the ones being left. But make no mistake, watching our children leave home is one of the most important turning points in our life. It is also the fulcrum on which the remainder of our life rests.

Some of us may look back with longing to the good old days of being in college or of day-to-day motherhood. But others will face the future as women with decades of a new and different kind of life ahead of us. It's a life that includes our growing and grown children, but one that also goes beyond motherhood. This is a life starring us, written by us, and directed by us. If our lives were a movie, it would be called Mom, Emancipated. Or maybe Motherhood, Unplugged.

This new postmommyhood life is a luxury endowed to baby-boom women because we've had fewer children and will live longer than mothers have ever lived before, so we have more good years left after our children leave for college or jobs. There are millions of us, and our numbers are growing each year, as more and more of the youngest children of baby-boom parents leave home. Census figures indicate that about seventy-seven million Americans are baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964. Of them, at least thirty million no longer have children younger than eighteen.

As members of a huge cohort, the giant generation known as the baby boom, we're moving toward this turning point with a lot of company. Right now, around half of married-couple families do not include any children. And every year for the next decade that proportion will continue to rise.

As more mothers join the no-children-at-home brigade, we will also be reinventing ourselves. We are a generation with a unique mind-set, one that values honesty and independence, one that endorses feminism and shared parenting. We would never say that a woman's place is only in the home - to be a wife, to stay at home, to defer to her mate. Instead, we embrace the notion that women have choices. It's acceptable for women to marry or not, to have children or not, to be highly educated or not, to work full-time or not. We love the idea of giving ourselves choices as we make our way through life. We question authority, we are irreverent, we are idealists, and we are obsessed with youth, even as we ourselves grow older.

Copyright © 2007 by Carin Rubenstein, Ph.D.

About the Author

Carin Rubenstein earned a Ph.D. in social/personality psychology from New York University, with a specialty in survey research. Her dissertation was a study of loneliness in America, which she published as a book, called In Search of Intimacy. In those early years, when she was quite young but didn't realize it, she worked as a research assistant for Gail Sheehy, conducting the survey work for several of Sheehy's books. Her first job was as an editor at Psychology Today, which in those days was a respectable, national magazine. She was also an editor, briefly, at The New York Times and at Time-Life (as it was known in those long-ago days). She has been a free-lance writer for many magazines, including Family Circle and Self and Glamour. She also wrote The Sacrificial Mother, about the dangers of giving up too much of yourself for your children. In recent years, she wrote for a regional edition of The New York Times. The moment that her second and last child left home for college, she rushed to her desk and wrote this book, mostly to avoid the pangs of loss.