Holding Space for Grown Children

With whales as my guides, I dive deeper into this learning

image by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen, Unsplash

Before I get to the article about holding space for grown children (plus some interesting whale facts down at the bottom), here’s a reminder that you have 39 days left to register for the How to Hold Space Foundation Program, or (for those who’ve completed the Foundation Program) the Certification Program. Also, we start Not the Main Character tomorrow, so you have one day left to join us. We look forward to welcoming all who come to our circles!

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Listen…

“Maybe the mama-whales can teach me what it means to swim wild in big waters and still hold your family close. Maybe they can teach me how to use echolocation to reach through the water for my faraway daughters.”

I wrote the above paragraph three years ago, when my three daughters were moving far away from me. I’d just dropped off my youngest daughter at university on the west coast and then cried my way through a whale-watching tour before driving the long hours back to my home on the prairies.

In a full-circle moment, on the ferry heading back to my new home on the island two weeks ago, after moving my daughter back to university for her final year (she’d spent the summer with me), I spotted two whales, and one waved its fin in my direction. “Remember?” I imagined her to be saying. “You are still on this learning journey. You are still learning to let go.”

As I write this, tears are beginning to flow again. I miss my girls. Even as I cheer them on from far away, and even though I am grateful for this post-child-rearing life I’ve built in this beautiful place, I still often ache for the days when they were nearer.

Recently, because of the stage of life I’m in and the type of people I tend to attract into the work I do, I’ve been having a lot of conversations about this transitional stage of parenthood, when adult children are moving away, both physically and emotionally. Many of us are trying to navigate this new liminality, not knowing what shape our relationships with grown children will evolve into as they build lives apart from ours.

Here are a few things I’ve reflected on, after many conversations about it plus my own experience:

• Especially for mothers, there is additional complexity in this period of our lives because we spent most of our parenting years under patriarchy’s pressure to be model moms (plus capitalism’s way of individualizing us and isolating us from community care). We feel lost in trying to shape our identities and purpose on the other side of that pressure, and instead of rewarding us for surviving it, our cultures respond by devaluing older women and making us feel invisible.

• Because we tried so hard to be good parents (often overlooking our own wounds and needs in the process), it’s especially destabilizing when our children pull away from us or challenge the ways we parented. There is cognitive dissonance in trying to hold both the belief that “I was a good parent” and “I made mistakes that caused harm.”

• Our children have grown up in an era when it became much more acceptable to talk about mental health, and to set boundaries (even with parents), and many of them are treating us differently than we expected to be treated (or than we were allowed to treat our parents). With a generation that is much more informed about trauma than we were, but not necessarily with the skills yet to navigate complexity and do repair work in relationships, some of their choices seem baffling and extreme to our generation.

• For some of us, parenting brought up a lot of our own trauma (and perhaps even caused it), but we weren’t equipped to witness or heal that trauma in the early days when we were trying to be emotionally stable parents for small children. To survive, we learned to dissociate, compartmentalize, and stuff it down. It’s only now that the children have grown (and may be shining mirrors back at us) that many of us are being confronted with it and getting knocked off balance.

In the three years since my daughters moved away from home, I have been SO grateful for the work I did years earlier, in deepening my practice of holding space. The work that it took to create my courses on holding space (especially the How to Hold Space Foundation Program) and then eventually write my first book equipped me in ways I could never have imagined I’d need to be equipped. AND this experience has deepened the practice even further.

Based on those years of practicing and teaching holding space, and on my own experience of this liminal space of releasing my daughters into their faraway lives, I offer these bits of guidance and support. Know that I do so with great humility, fully aware that I have made plenty of mistakes and am still learning what the whales have yet to teach me.

Dear parent of grown children,

1. Let yourself grieve and feel the feelings you need to feel. There is great loss in this time – not only a loss of closeness and time together but a loss of identity and purpose. But there is also joy and possibility and regret and fear and... ALL THE THINGS. Be tender with yourself and hold space for the complexity of emotions without shaming yourself for having them. Hold them mindfully, letting them come and then letting them go.

2. Notice your enmeshment/codependency patterns. Oh how hard it is to witness in ourselves a tendency to be overly attached to another person’s needs and emotional well-being, especially with children we’ve raised! If you notice anxiety and the urgent need to fix rise up in you every time your child faces a challenge, or if you find yourself spiraling every time they don’t respond to a text, you may be in a codependent pattern. In this enmeshed/codependent relational pattern, you place too much of a burden on your child to validate you, show gratitude, and sometimes even protect you. It may take some trauma healing work (especially if you have childhood abandonment trauma) to change the pattern of your relationship, but it will make your life and theirs more peaceful.

3. Take responsibility for the mistakes you made and meet your children with humility. As your children grow, there’s a good chance they will see you in a new light (especially if they’re beginning to raise children of their own). They may feel the need to confront you with what feels like harm to them. Whether or not you agree with their assessment, it’s your job, first and foremost, to listen without defensiveness and a willingness to see their perspective. When your child feels heard, there’s a greater chance they’ll feel safe enough to invest in growing and/or repairing the relationship. There may be an opportunity, at some point, to communicate your position or explain your choices, but don’t rush toward justification. Listen first and be humble enough to own your fumbles.

4. Release your children to their own journeys, but make yourself available when they need a safe place to land. Years ago, when my older two daughters were entering the teen years, I read a blog post written by a father who said that parenting in the teen years was like witnessing your child enter a tunnel you couldn’t enter with them, and all you could do was stand outside and hope that they would make it through. The wisdom of “standing by the tunnel” has stayed with me ever since, and it turns out that the teen years were just the practice ground. Each of your children has their own journey to make and you need to let them enter the tunnel no matter how hard it is to let go of their hand. Stand by the tunnel, send them love while they’re in it, but don’t give up your own life while they’re in there and, unless intervention is absolutely necessary, don’t try to smash through the boulders to get to them. Take deep breaths, dear parent, and let go, even if that means respecting new boundaries that feel painful to you.

5. Build your own life, find goodness in yourself, and find your own source of joy. It sounds paradoxical, but one of the greatest gifts you can give your children is to love yourself and to build a life that you love. This frees them from any guilt they might otherwise feel over abandoning you and it gives them a model to strive for in their own adult lives. I would advocate, in fact, that every parent whose children move away from home should consider taking some form of “gap year” – a year in which you focus your energy in discovering yourself in a new way and finding your sources of joy now that you have more time and space for yourself. I will never regret my choice to travel around the world and live nomadically for 18 months after my children left. If travel’s not your thing, find local ways to explore: take classes, try new hobbies, renovate your home, join a club – just find a way to be playful in your exploration.

If you’d like more support in learning to let go of and hold space for your children, I welcome you to register for the How to Hold Space – Foundation Program. The content holds lots of hard-won wisdom (and plenty of vulnerable stories of my fumbles) that I believe would be of great support for any parent, especially those learning to release adult children, plus the international community that participates always offers a nourishing place to deepen the learning. You might also benefit from the video series I launched last week on the Core Needs Triad (available with a paid membership here at atenderspace.substack.com) about how much our unmet or threatened needs commandeer our internal operating systems and run the show. There is also still time to register for Not the Main Character, a course that will help you play a supporting role as your grown children step into their starring roles.

BONUS: Since you’ve stuck around until the end, perhaps you’d like a few interesting whale facts?

• Humpback whale mothers and their calves whisper to each other through soft squeaks and grunts. It is thought that by “whispering”, mums are able to keep track of their calves while the soft sounds make it harder for potential predators to hear them. (source)

• Orcas live in matriarchal pods and the matriarch passes her experience down through the generations. The orca pod I encountered after dropping off my daughter at university, in fact, is thought to be a grandmother, mother, and two sons, with the grandmother believed to be around seventy years old.

• Female sperm whales are known to create “babysitting pools” to protect each other’s infants while the mothers go on deep dives in search of prey. (source)

• Humpback whales do not feed during the months they are on the breeding grounds. That means that the fifty gallons of milk a day that a baby whale consumes comes from the mother’s blubber stores. A mother humpback whale can lose up to one third of her body weight until she feeds again. (source)

• Male orcas do not care for their own offspring, but they are great babysitters, companions and playmates to younger relatives in their natal matrilines. (source)

• Male orcas are especially dependent on their mothers, even in adulthood: if a male’s mother dies after he reaches maturity, he is three times more likely to die the following year. (source)

• In most animal species, females reproduce until their deaths, but female orcas, like humans, go through menopause and have prolonged post-reproductive lifespans. Post-reproductive females provide significant benefits to their family during this extended life phase (by passing down information about where to find food, for example), and boost the survival of their offspring and grand-offspring. (source)