The Kids are Grown, Now What?
In this series, our Resident Sage responds to challenges readers are grappling with in their lives. All stories are anonymized for privacy.
I (50F) have been a stay at home mom since my son (20) was born. My younger child (17F) is now a junior in high school and I’d like to re-enter the workforce. The problem is, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I can do, and I don’t know what I want to do. I have a law degree that has gone unused all this time, so I know I am intelligent and competent, but I have no intention of practicing law again. I feel aimless and displaced. Where should I start?
Since this blog is called Elemental Happiness, let’s look at this question in light of the Five Elements of Traditional Chinese Medicine. If your kids are (nearly) grown and have started to leave the house, you are suffering from separation: not just the physical separation from your children, but also the loss of identity that comes from that. This creates a Metal imbalance, as Metal is about boundaries, including how you define yourself. As a stay-at-home mom of 20 years, it’s easy to see how raising your children defined how you saw yourself, so your question now becomes, “Who am I without the kids? Who am I in my community?”
Let’s look at the circle of elements, which are ordered in this way for good reason. If you have a Metal problem, you must look to its preceding element, Earth. For over 20 years, you have been caring for your children and family; this means you are strong in the Earth element. Now if you have to enhance your Metal because you have a deficiency, you first need to refine from the abundance of the earth, the maturity of the earth, some essence. It’s like making jam out of fruit, you have to extract the essence that has the taste.
What does this mean? Think about what made you strong in Earth: you juggled two kids and a household. Filter out what the essence of that time is. Determine what you actually made out of yourself and that will help to redefine yourself. Essence is not your skills or talents; essence is extracting what you need from the earth and leaving the debris behind. A lot of women say I was “only” a housewife or “only” a mother; this is totally dismissive and wrong. You can have learned skills, you have learned essence, you can extract essence from these 20 years of taking care of the kids. And when you have that together, that in itself can feed the Metal imbalance.
Making essence is not going back to the talents you always had. You can come back to your talents when you rebuild your identity. First you have to come up with these 20 years of essence. Maybe now you understand the school system or other kids much better, that would be an essence, that would be an experience that turns into an essence that you can use. Maybe you use that essence to become an adviser for kids at school. Or you go back into law and specialize in helping kids in lawsuits. Or you just see whether the school district has a need for someone who has lawyers’ skills.
What you choose to do depends on who you are and what you want. Two mothers in the same exact situation who’ve probably done roughly the same things in terms of caring for their families may still end up on two different paths after that phase of their lives. While they may have done essentially the same things (pun intended), their interests and skill sets and talents may diverge.
Once you begin to bring your Metal back into balance, you then can go a step further and look at the following element of Water. The Water element is about purpose; it takes the essence and helps to define the purpose of your life. So this is often what happens in the grieving process when your Metal is out of balance: when you lose something or someone that is very important to you, then you often sink down into the water and think, “What is life about? Why did I have to lose this wonderful person?” This filtering of the essence and then giving it to the Water can start the whole cycle because after the Water, there is Wood, and Wood is about new beginnings, growth, and power. So if you go along the cycle, if you take out the debris from the caring, the Earth, you fix the Metal imbalance, you imbue the essence into the water to define your life purpose. Then you can go with that and go into your own power and you grow again. And out of that growth you come to the Fire which turns into self individual love. Now you have the circle completed, and you can use the Five Elements circle to find the right way, to find from the confusing, overburdened, and circular mess of Earth, you can go back into your power, and back into something you love again.
-E