I am 60. I have 3 adult children - ages 31, 34, 37. I dont see them very often. They are living and working and growing within their own lives. I am ok with that. I understand better than ever just how fast their days are beginning to move.
BUT...
I find myself - especially in the quiet of night - wondering if that's all there is to it. Is it really just adult kids living their lives or is it at least partly the failings of a mother? I know if I asked them - what they would say. But I often wonder how much of their distance is due to their moms choices. Choices in getting remarried, choices in moving to a new home, etc.
I often feel a void between us... that I dont know how to breach. When I think of them as children - I KNOW those little people. I dont really know them as adults. I know we have different ideas involving lots of things - but so do my own parents and me, yet I still see them weekly and love them more than ever.
I feel guilt that I dont ask them over for Sunday dinners or family game nights - and yet... when I think about actually doing it... I feel anxious. Anxious because I know that there is no camaraderie between my daughter-in-law and myself, and because my two sons partners dont really care for each other either. My own daughter lives in Georgia, so that's that. I see her once a year - maybe twice on a good year. And it is usually for 2 days at most.
I know I have created a life that they surely feel alienated in... and yet.... I dont know how to do it differently for them now.
Maybe the fact that there are no grandchildren has hindered my relationships... I know how instrumental my own parents were in my kids upbringing. Or maybe that is just an excuse too.
It has been many years since they were living under my roof - and while some of them were hard - I always sort of felt like " I had my hand on the pulse" so to speak. Agree or disagree - I knew them then.
Maybe in some weird way - it isnt that I miss knowing them...it's that I miss that they really never got to know ME.
As a peer, as a woman, as more than a mom. As a person.
I wonder a lot as my life moves into twilight - if they will one day wish they could pick up the phone just to hear an old familiar voice that no matter what, no matter where, no matter when - will love them and feel their deepest pain as if it were my own?
My own grandfather was not much older than me when he started making comments about being an old man - and not having any worth to the world. I could NOT understand how he could think that... but something happens to parents when they look around and see no one to parent. It feels hollow somehow - and you look inward at all the ways you feel you failed...
Having said all this - I dont know what I would have done differently - I couldnt have stayed married to their dad - i know that much. I could have stayed alone and lived in the house they grew up in - and maybe then - they would still be stopping by for a hello on occasion - but then again... maybe not. I am happy with the choices I made for myself...but haunted by the thought that those same choices may have driven a rift between us all as adults.
The joy I had of finally having the means to buy them too much for Christmas and occasionally send them a few extra dollars has started to fade. Do they see my lifestyle now as somehow boastful? I have it all... the house, the car, the vacations...and yet... I feel hollow when I look over my shoulder to find no one standing there.