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Midlife Lessons: How To Cope When Your Children Don’t Need You Anymore
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Sorry to be such a downer, but I’ve been struggling with something as unavoidable as death and taxes this week. My children are now old enough to be away from home without me.
I can see the value in them learning independence from their parents—most often from their poor old dad—but each absence is another reminder of what is to come.
The latest disappearance is my eldest daughter’s trip to “Brontë Country” with a friend's family. This is a laudable endeavor; she is studying Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre at school, so the chance to visit the land of Emily and Charlotte in Yorkshire, England, will do her good. She’s 15, so she, rather than her 12-year-old sister, has been the one most often away from home.
But even the younger one had her first week away from her parents this year, on a school vacation. As the Hall & Oates song goes, “Every time you go away, you take a piece of me with you."
Seeing my daughters grow up into smart, funny, mature young women is a privilege, but I also remember what a privilege it was to raise them. Looking back at the years before middle school, it feels like paradise now. Today I face a new challenge.
It’s my next job—and the job of every parent—to come to terms with their children separating themselves and finding their own way: their own lives, opinions, dreams and identities. I’m OK with all that, but I’m struggling to work out what my purpose will be as they slowly drift away.
My wife and daughters went on vacation with some friends earlier this summer too, leaving me alone for a week. Whenever this happened in the past, I always enjoyed it as I got to slow down and do a few things for myself (what to watch: Kurosawa and Bergman or Rocky IV and Team America: World Police ?), but this time it filled me with trepidation. I felt it was a test. Could I make sense of the world without my family around?
I think I failed, to be honest. But at least it got me thinking about how I might succeed one day. I knew that my relationships with my daughters had to evolve .
My younger daughter isn't old enough yet to assert her independence in any material way (not that she hasn’t tried), but even with her, I am conscious of clinging to her as a “child” too much while her big sister spends more and more time away from us. A 12-year-old girl does not want her embarrassing dad hanging around all the time. There are friends to message, clothes to be bought, TV to watch, and gossip to be spread.
I am becoming obsolete. I am a school overhead projector. A can of Pepsi Blue. A home telephone.
This is one of the main contributors to the classic midlife crisis . Your children’s growth into young adults can seem to diminish you, since you have spent a chunk of your life dedicated to them, often putting your own needs and desires to one side. I don’t have a problem with that part of it; that’s what you sign up for. But I can sense, more than anything, the waning of that intense closeness that comes with the dependence of a child and the emptiness it leaves as they need you less and less.
It’s hard not to take it personally, and I’ve never been good with rejection. Let’s be positive though: maybe I can learn from this too. Maybe my children can teach me something useful (other than what Slushy Noobz is).
Don’t underestimate the power of acceptance. Stoicism is an absolute essential of middle age. As American Express used to say, “Don’t leave home without it." You don’t just need stoicism when you step outside; you need it from the moment you wake up. I need to adjust to having a loving relationship with my children even when they are not around, not at the dinner table or not watching a movie together.
Grinning and bearing it is not enough. I need to accept it and learn to love the next stage of family life as much as I loved the one that is gradually, inexorably coming to an end.
Thank God for midlife careers, eh? At least I have a car and a bank account, two things my daughters definitely still need me for.
George Chesterton is Newsweek’s Director, Publishing & Subscription Strategy.
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