Adult Children

I was in my 60s when my relationship with my adult daughter finally broke completely. The details don’t matter as much as this truth: I spent the first six months believing my life was over. How could it not be?

I’m sitting in my therapist’s office, crying into a tissue that’s basically disintegrated, and he asks me a question that stops me cold: “Whose anxiety are you actually managing right now?” I start to…

They don’t tell you about this part of motherhood in the parenting books. They don’t prepare you for the Christmas when your adult child doesn’t call. When the addiction has its hooks in so deep you don’t recognize them anymore…

There’s a moment in every mother’s journey when she realizes that the way she’s been showing up is no longer serving anyone – not her children, and certainly not herself…

I’m going to start with a simple question: “Is the world changing?” Yes, it is, especially when it comes to family. Family was an intricate part of our lives up until the early 1970s. The years beyond the 1970s took us from the “nuclear family” structure into diverse paradigms…

In my 60s, I finally understood why my body had been screaming at me for 30 years. The tightness in my chest wasn’t “just anxiety.” The knot in my stomach wasn’t “overthinking.” The exhaustion that followed every interaction with my adult child wasn’t “getting older…

Boundaries aren’t walls that keep love out. They’re bridges to the kind of relationships I actually want – built on respect instead of obligation, truth instead of resentment. For decades, I believed that being a good mother, a good daughter, a good woman meant saying yes…

I am a single mom of two adult men. I’ve been a single mom their entire life, so it has been hard for me to transition to “letting go.” It has been easier with the eldest (because I assumed he didn’t need me anymore), but harder with the youngest. Sometimes I’m losing on both ends…

I am known for exposing the “elephant in the living room.” Those things everybody knows but nobody is talking about. Not every mother-daughter relationship reads like a Hallmark card, and our culture makes that a shameful secret to bear…

They don’t prepare you for this part of parenting in any baby book. Nobody tells you that decades after you’ve stopped cutting grapes into quarters and checking for fevers, you might face the hardest parenting decision of your life. I was in my 60s when my phone rang…