Adult Children

If setting a boundary with your adult child feels harder now than it did decades ago, you’re not imagining it. Boundaries at this stage of life come with a particular weight that they didn’t carry when your children were young. Logic might suggest boundaries get easier as you get older – more confidence, more life experience, less need for others’ approval. In practice, many women find the opposite…

By the time we reach our 60s, most of us have quietly rewritten a lot of our life’s plans – careers that took different turns, health that doesn’t cooperate the way it used to, friendships that faded. Family is often the last picture we’re still holding onto exactly as we first imagined it.

It’s his life, not yours… Thattechnically true sentence is kind of useless emotionally. Parents of unhappy adults live with a silent grief and unlike in other distressing situations, there are no rituals or support for the heartbreak of watching an adult child struggle. Even though it remains difficult as well, we’re not talking here about an adult who’s going through a rough patch, a breakup, a job loss, a burnout…

If you’re over 60 and finding yourself grieving a relationship with your adult child that technically hasn’t ended – no fight, no falling out, just… distance – you are far from alone, and there’s a reason this particular grief is so disorienting. Most griefs we’re taught to recognize have a clear beginning: a death, a diagnosis, a divorce papers signed. This one doesn’t…

Parents know (or hope) the day will come when they look at their children and realize they’ve become self-sufficient adults. Not just legally adults, but functioning adults. The kind who pay their own bills, solve their own problems, make their own appointments, and call home because they want to – not because they need something or someone to rescue them…

We have no shortage of advice telling us to let go. Let go of the past. Let go of what we can’t control. Let go of our adult children’s choices, our ex-husbands’ opinions, the roles we’ve outgrown, the expectations we’ve been carrying since before…

If there is one thing we all noticed a little more of during the Covid lockdown, it was the amount of clutter we had accumulated and the impact it can have on how we feel in our own homes. Perhaps for the first time, you clearly felt the impact…

Recently, I took a trip to Idaho to visit my son. He’ll be 56 this July. I adopted him when he was six weeks old, and from the moment he came into my life, he brought me more joy than I could ever explain in a sentence or two. We’ve had a good life together. Not perfect. No life is. But real. As parents, I think we sometimes freeze our children in time without realizing it…

One of the strangest parts of midlife motherhood is realizing your children still matter deeply to you while also realizing they no longer need you in the same way. No one really prepares women for that emotional transition. We spend decades building lives around driving, organizing…

A woman once told me something that stopped me in my tracks. She said, “I don’t know what my children think I’m planning… and honestly, I’m afraid to ask.”
She wasn’t worried about conflict. She loved her children deeply, and they had a good relationship. But underneath it all sat a quiet uncertainty: Do they expect to inherit the house?