Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 5)

All of us in the baby boom are traversing the same path through this half of adult life. Some of us are already there; others will be there soon enough. But eventually we all will be in the same postmommyhood boat together.

The question is this: will we chart a new course for ourselves and our new lives, or will we paddle around in circles, never getting anywhere we haven't already been?

The answer is the subject of this book.

My focus here is mostly on the intense five- or ten-year period when all of these changes take place. I'll offer women examples of how to be thrivers and survivors, rather than stuck and out of luck. Thrivers and survivors embrace life's many changes, not just biological ones, like menopause, but those that are psychological, like giving up the fulltime mother role and replacing it with something equally exciting and rewarding.

Perhaps most important, however, this book is not about how children change as they are launched. And it is not about fathers, either. It is about the mothers who are initiating the launch countdown. It is about the women who emerge on the other side of motherhood, while also propelling themselves into motherhood's second half. The feeling is remarkably similar to breaking from our own parents, only now it's the mirror image. It is a time of intense self-reflection, selfexamination, and a new setting of priorities. It is a time for undoing regrets, for exploring all possible selves, for finding hidden identities that have been squelched under the enormous pressure of Being Mom.

Fathers deal with their own sense of loss when their children leave home, but theirs is a different story, and one that I am not going to touch upon here. Quite frankly, the issue often matters more to mothers, and they are more likely to experience some anguish and soul-searching about what happens next. I would guess, however, that much of what I say here will apply to fathers, especially those who had primary responsibility for child rearing.

For most women, the MotherLaunch stage is triggered when children leave home. That's when the mother mode is in the "off " position, and the "me" mode is turned back on. Millions of baby-boom mothers have devoted enormous energy and affection and attention to their children for at least eighteen years. And, although it shouldn't come as a surprise to them, many are completely unprepared for what comes next, for defining themselves as someone who is other than mother.

How will mothers adjust to having no children at home? How will we fill our time, and our hearts? How will we manage to have adult children who are, nevertheless, still dependent? How will we cope with having adult children who sometimes disappoint or hurt or irritate us?

These are questions for all empty-nest mothers, and they are also my own.

But just because our children are gone doesn't mean we've vanished from our parenting lives in a puff of smoke. Actually, many of us are stealth parents, because we are in disguise. We still live in the child-centric neighborhoods and towns in which we raised our children, only our children aren't home anymore. We look pretty much like everybody else, maybe a little worn around the edges, but we certainly haven't turned into graying grannies rocking on our front porches. Actually, we could probably pass as mothers of school-age children, because so many other boomers postponed having children into their thirties and forties.

And even after our children leave home, they tend to come back, usually several times. Mine, for instance, have returned temporarily.

They were gone while I wrote most of this book, but now they're home again, and I'm juggling the needs of two almost-adult children. Both of my children are in college, but it's summer now, so they are both back home. My son returned from his freshman year in May, and it took him almost four weeks to find a job. Finally, he was hired as a busboy at a snooty country club a few towns away. He was working six days a week, for low wages and to the point of exhaustion. But five weeks later, he was fired. So he's home again.

My daughter has been studying in the Dominican Republic and Argentina for a year, but now she's back home for a few weeks, trying to catch up on a year's worth of sleep deprivation. At the end of the summer, she will need a ride back to school, three hundred miles south, to move into an unfurnished apartment in Washington D.C. The same week, my son will need a ride back to school, three hundred miles north, to Boston.

Finally, in September, my husband and I will be on our own again, along with our dog, Kippy.

In case you haven't noticed, the process of emptying the nest of children takes years. In fact, it's like a five- or seven-year labor and delivery period. The children leave and return, leave and return, many times over. Eventually, the yo-yoing of the empty nest, full nest, empty nest, full nest will be over, but there's no way of knowing in advance how long that process will take.

That's why this time of life requires a whole new way of thinking about ourselves, as mothers, as wives, and as women. We have to unthink our sense of ourselves as full-time mothers and rethink ourselves as other than mothers, as postmothers.

This is actually much easier to do than it may first appear.

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.