The hard news about learning personal boundaries later in life
Personal Story: learning boundaries later-in-life. Reflections as an adult daughter & mother of an adult daughter.
The cadence of my summer has had a different flow to it than usual, but I have gotten in some vacation-feeling moments. One of my summer highlights was an afternoon I spent with my adult daughter. We took a sweet little hike to spend time together in nature, and to catch up.
(**important side note: being the mother to young adults has been a very different experience for me than being the mother to young ones; and holy smokes, being the parent of teenagers that were individuating was an entirely different chapter. No myth of neat and tidy life here!!! I am simply sharing a sweet moment in time**)
It’s wild to juxtapose the time I spend with my adult daughter to the time I spend with my mother as her adult daughter
With my daughter, the conversations flow. Topics include what we are into these days. It’s a heart-led unfolding based on what we are each excited to share. It may be books, music, career, friendships, etc. (Our most recent visit included many exchanges about the Barbie Movie!!!) There are no “shoulds”. We both trust one another’s journey.
And I to be more specific, as the mother, I trust HER journey. I’ve lived long enough to know that the path is not linear, and it often makes more sense as we look back with hindsight. So, unlike my experience with my own mother, I don’t need her updates to be neat and manicured soundbites that are designed for me to share with my friends and neighbors when they ask how my kids are doing. (Which is only notable because I felt like I was my mother’s personal PR agent with a responsibility to make sure my mother looks good)
As wonderful as it feels that we can have these connected & authentic conversations, there’s hard news too. Keeping it real means that sometimes we tackle hard topics.
Here’s the hard news
My daughter and I also sometimes talk about the past. Those are the conversations when I am especially grateful for this remothering work, so that I can be there for my younger parts while remaining the adult my daughter deserves to have present with her. (more often than not, but no myth of perfection)
Holding the space for what is. Including the messy parts. Including the mistakes I made, even though OF COURSE if I had known better, I would have done better. Of course, I wish I had understood healthy and aligned boundaries when she and my son were younger rather than modeling outdated “otherish” programming. (especially in my relationship with my mother and with their dad)
But, just because I love my children and WISH I had known certain things sooner in their lives (and my own life!!!) doesn’t make it so. Which means, as her mother, I can now hold the space for healing and repair. Those aren’t easy conversations, but it is my hope that it’s in service to her own remothering journey and her own healing forward.
It’s one of the harder aspects of learning healthy boundaries.
As a person that arrived into adulthood with enormous blind spots in my understanding of boundaries, I do not take my healthy boundaries skills for granted. They were hard-earned, and I have first hand experience of what a positive impact they’ve had on my own quality of life as well as those I love most in this world.
The and/also is that there are some challenges in learning about boundaries later in life. One of them is that it can be a really unpleasant feeling when we realize that the misguided programming that was in our blind spot all of these years, was impacting the people we love most in this world.
That’s a hard consequence to face. But when we do finally know better, and we move into whatever repair is appropriate for the situation, what we are modeling for the people around us is that we don’t have to be perfect, and they don’t have to be perfect, we all get to keep learning forward and growing.
Here’s to the remothering moments. Here’s to us having us.
Here’s to our real lives, our messy human adventures. Not perfect, but instead authentic and aligned.
From my heart to yours.
