Adult Children

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…

Some of us moms have a problem with our attachment to our children, to the point where the bond can become unhealthy. Can we love our children but not let their choices or behavior make us crazy? Is some detachment actually a good idea?

You promised yourself it wouldn’t happen again. You’d stop answering those late-night calls. You’d quit sending money you don’t have. You’d stop fixing problems that aren’t yours to fix. But then, the voice on the other end trembles – your adult child’s, or maybe your ex’s…

For years, you were the one who made everything better. You found the missing shoes, calmed the tantrums, juggled the bills, and made sure everyone had what they needed. You were the glue. The heartbeat. The fixer. But now your children are grown…

I was 60 when I realized the words I used with my son weren’t mine. They were my mother’s. And before that, my grandmother’s. Three generations saying “stop crying” when feelings got big. Three generations of kids learning emotions weren’t safe. I’d spent 40 years as a healthcare…

If we haven’t already, we need to make sure we’ve had “the talk” with our children by the time we reach retirement. This does not refer to the infamous sex talk we have with our children during their pre-teen stage, but about our end-of-life…

By the time we reached our 50s and 60s, most of us thought the hardest years of parenting were behind us. The toddler tantrums, the teenage battles, the sleepless nights – we survived them all. We figured the hard part was done. We thought we had “earned” the rest. But then adulthood…