Part 4

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

(Page 4 of 5)

My delight in my own children's departure is, quite frankly, tinged with envy. My children are at their beginning; they do not yet know great disappointment, failure, or rejection. They live communal lives, among their closest friends. In fact, they live a Club Med life, a year-round, all-inclusive vacation, with food, lodging, entertainment, and education paid for in advance by me and my husband. My daughter goes to school in Washington, D.C., but travels constantly, to study and to work. My son goes to school near Boston, at the center of the known college-student universe.

"What's not to like about that?" as one of my friends asks. She's the one who says that paying college tuition is like paying for a fantastic cruise every month, only you never get to go anywhere. It's like emptying your savings account in front of a fan, and watching it blow child-ward.

It's not that I'd want to be young again, but I wouldn't mind a trip back to my younger self, as in Francis Ford Coppola's 1986 movie Peggy Sue Got Married. The middle-aged mom travels back in time to become her high-school self, only she knows about everything that has happened in the decades since, including the invention of pantyhose and computer chips. I'd love to be equipped with my much wiser, middle-aged brain, plunked into my much better, and younger, body. I'd appreciate what I had a lot more, and I wouldn't take any of it as seriously.

It's too bad there's no such thing as Fantasy on Demand, like HBO, only customized. I'd take a few months of time travel back to my younger self, if I could afford it.

Back to my real life. Here, in the no-time-travel zone, I'm nervous, but pleased to launch myself into the postmotherhood phase. Life without children at home is drastically different for me, certainly. Although I work full-time, my own daily routine used to revolve around an axis of children that no longer exists. Even with teenage children, I had a schedule of forcing breakfast, packing lunches, planning evening activities and dinnertimes. I had a car-borrowing schedule and permission slips to sign and proms and school concerts to prepare for. I had baseball games and ballet performances to attend.

That carefully planned, child-centric calendar is gone, replaced by my own life, and my husband's.

Gone is the mealtime pressure. Gone is the car borrowing and stay-up-until-he-gets-home pressure. But gone, too, are the good-night kisses and head pats accepted by teenagers, gone are the minor and elusive details of what's going on in my children's lives, day by day, night by night.

Friends tell me that they miss the commotion of having teenagers at home. They miss the noise of bad rap music. They miss the endless telephoning and texting and IMing. My friend Teri says that she has begun to miss what she hasn't seen for at least fifteen years, when her son was a toddler. "I miss his toothless grin. Every once in a while, I look at that picture of him, and I miss that little boy," she says. "When he started to walk, I'd put out my foot to trip him, so he wouldn't run away from me so fast," she adds.

Still, he ran, all the way to freshman year in college. And this time she let him go, without sticking her foot out.

Our daily duty of mothering little children, and big ones, is over and done with. Sometimes it seems so completely vanished it's as if it never existed at all.

But then I remember all the work, the many years of meal planning, for instance.

I prepared three meals a day, five days a week, minimum, for, let's say, fifteen years. That's at least 11,700 meals cooked for two children, not including my husband's food. That's a lot of planning and shopping and cooking and cleaning up.

But I don't have to do that anymore. My husband and I eat easily prepared food, and we don't complain if we eat the same thing three nights in a row.

Then there's our marriage. We're all alone again, just the way we were before we struggled with serious fertility problems, before I had surgery, before I got pregnant, before I bore and raised two children.

So what do we do now? He's still here, and so I am, but nothing else is the same. We're older and heavier; he's got a lot less hair, while mine is graying rapidly. We have decades of child rearing between us that seem to have lasted forever, but also seem to have lasted no longer than a millisecond.

Some days, I feel as if I am desperate for a system reboot, as if I were a faulty computer. I long to restore my family system to the way it was ten or fifteen years ago, so I can do it all over again, only better. But if I think about it carefully, that's not really what I want. I'm pretty sure I don't have the energy, or the motivation, to make that enormous effort all over again.

I'm finished with the intensity of daily mothering. My mother-mode days are over, and my me-mode days are back.

There is a definite upside to this transformation.

Not only don't I have to worry about what I'm serving for dinner, I also don't have to worry about being at home at a certain time or having the car back or doing errands for time-pressured teenagers. I am first on my list of priorities again, in a way I haven't been for twenty years.

One of my friends, a mother of two, sees many advantages in having sent her youngest son off to college in Virginia. She is sad, she says, but "my husband is thrilled. There's not another man to get into pissing matches with." Not only that, she adds, but "we can go into New York City without worrying if a party's going on at our house!"

Another woman I know, a mother of three whose twins just left for college in upstate New York, is giddy with the notion that she's on her own during the day.

She can play tennis, go to meetings, meet friends, work on charity events, all without worrying about being home to pick up the kids or to make dinner, she says. The sense of complete freedom, she reports, is invigorating, and even a little scary.

She feels guilty about not feeling bad that they're gone!

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.