When Your Kids Need You Less, Will You Be Ready?

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There’s something about intensive parenting culture that no one talks about, which is that while it’s sucking the life out of you, it can also dramatically simplify your life in a way that can bring unexpected relief. Allowing your kids and their needs to take up most of the space in your brain pushes most everything else to the sidelines — questions of ambition, satisfaction, desire, boredom. Many parents spend over a decade learning to forget what they really want so as to be effective stewards of their kids’ growth. Ostensibly, this represents a painful sacrifice, and at first it really does feel like one. Weekends cease to be days of rest. Early mornings acquire their own rites and rituals, none of which involve self-care. But humans are adaptable. We learn to love what confines us. Some of us might even find the winnowing down of possibilities oddly freeing. A crystal-clear logic rules your life as a new parent: When the babies are happy, you’re happy. Like sitting in an Adirondack chair on a dock at sunset, once you’re settled into this way of being, it’s hard to get out.

Especially when this kind of parenting provides a decade-long exemption from being held accountable for your bad attitude. Parents of young kids are always justified in being at least a little bit tense and grumpy. Who can blame them? They’re doing so much. So much, in fact, that years can go by without making any decisions based on their own dreams and desires.

For those of you still raising little kids, I come to you as the Ghost of Parenting Future: As much as you can’t wait for your children to become more independent, it will catch you off guard when they finally are. Many of you will have become so accustomed to being needed in a particular way that you will have fallen out of practice at being a free and easy wanderer. What will you do when rusty hinges on the cage you’ve built for yourself squeak back open? When you can finally open your eyes all the way back up to the life that surrounds you, will you like what you see?

This summer is the first time I’ve really noticed the change. I am not a helicopter parent and I have always used the summers as an excuse to basically slack off completely, but the kids have nonetheless formed the basic scaffolding of my days. For the past two weeks, we’ve been visiting family all together, and usually, these trips require a certain amount of sustained labor on my and my husband’s part: keeping the kids from hurting each other in the back seat during the six-plus-hour drives; avoiding meltdowns by keeping everyone fed at roughly the usual times; proposing and leading activities so as to prevent boredom; eternal provisioning of snacks, eternal snack-cleanup; extreme schlepping of stuff. My kids are now 11 and 14, and the past 15 summers of my life have been spent in more or less these same conditions, and they have allowed me to blame all my bad moods, when they inevitably pass through my body and brain, on the work of it all. When I’m grumpy it’s because I’m always being asked to do things. When I’m happy it’s because everyone is happy. It’s simple, clean math. But it’s no longer adding up.

My moods are suddenly my sole responsibility again. My children can feed themselves when they’re hungry. They can carry their own bags. They know exactly what they want to do when we reach our destinations, and in many cases they can do it by themselves. They put themselves to bed. They wake up at 10 a.m. It is every new parent’s fantasy: I drink my morning coffee in peace. After years of “survival mode,” I can now relax — if I can remember how. I am by no means complaining about this, but I will admit the emotional terrain of this new life is taking a little getting used to.

More than once, I’ve written about Heidegger’s concept of “standing reserve” and how pervasive it is in contemporary life. One of the hardest things about living in a state of standing reserve is that once you’ve started, it feels very hard to stop. Being available for your friends and family can feel like an eternal pact that you’ve made with them, written in blood, but it’s not. It’s renegotiable over time. But no one’s going to do it for you, unfortunately.

Years ago a friend made an observation I still think about all the time: As parents we tend to lag behind our kids as they grow up. As soon as we get used to one set of conditions, they change, and it can be hard to keep up. That little lag time is why I kept buying my younger son T-shirts at Old Navy that he now refers to as “innocent shirts” — i.e., the T-shirts worn by 7-year-olds with stripes or cartoon characters. Extremely lame if you’re 11, which of course I would know if I weren’t half-stuck in the world of five years ago.

There’s something tragic in a literary sort of way about aging into someone who can’t seem to keep up with the changes surrounding you. I’m sure we have all met people like this who are aggrieved by an invisible presence which, once you get to know them, you realize is a past version of their life that they haul around like a mouldering carpet bag. When you meet people like this among new parents, it’s their cool former life that haunts them. They are uncomfortable in their new roles and want everyone to know that they “haven’t changed.” But as we age, the characteristics of this sort of person shift. Now, they’re haunted by their uncool past, where they had gotten comfortable.

There is nothing wrong with adopting a child’s early bedtime for the rest of your life, or with having stopped partying, or with becoming quieter and more introverted since having kids. What’s important is that you chose to make these changes, that you decided they were the person who wished to become, rather than having blundered into them without realizing it was happening.

Much like the perimenopause symptoms that my friends and I often compare notes on, having your kids get older after having intensively parented thrusts you into another sort of adolescence. We are undergoing our own big transition after over a decade of living at least part-time in kid world. I think my occasional sour mood this summer has to do with discomfort within this transition. While I sit in blessed peace with my morning coffee, I realize that the day stretches undefined in front of me. I can do whatever I want — if only I could figure out exactly what it is that I want to do. Most of the time I do figure it out, but it takes a sustained period of self-awareness, where I have to repeat to myself what amounts to a mantra: What do you want to do? 

It doesn’t have to be much — reading my book for a few hours, or going on a thrifting excursion, or baking something interesting that my usual schedule would never allow time for — but it does have to feel entirely voluntary on my part, a firm answer to the question, “Where’s mom?” beyond something like, “She’s here waiting for you to ask her for something.”