Empty nest worries

I’ve written before about the differences between men and women when it comes to worry. My conclusions are based on completely non-scientific research, but everything I’ve observed since I wrote that post just convinces me further that what I concluded was valid. A lot of men worry in a more constructive, work-based or goal-oriented way, and know that too much worry is pointless. They are also confident that they can switch off worry when they want to. Women, on the other hand, often feel more trapped by worry, and have little or no confidence that they can control or turn off their worrying.

It may have something to do with the List that I wrote about in March, and our tendency to strive for acceptance and approval, even though we are often already doing too much. All women are different, and our lists vary, but I firmly believe that too many of us have a List. It really helps me to visualise my List as an actual piece of paper with items written on it, and this takes some of the power away. If I can see in my mind’s eye the words, ‘have a glittering career,’ and ‘be a perfect mother,’ written on a scrap of paper that I carry around with me, the impossibility of achieving these expectations, and the pressure that I can feel if I try to do that, are much clearer.

I had a lovely chat this morning with two friends. We are all mums, and we all have children of different ages. We agreed, however, that we all worry, or know we will worry, about our kids when they are away from home and we don’t know if they are safe or not. It’s built in to us to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our children, and that feeling of lack of control when we can’t do this can be uncomfortable or even painful. Of course, dads worry too, and they have an instinct to protect their kids, but I’m going to stick my neck out and say that dads, more than mums, are able to keep the worry under control and remember that it doesn’t achieve anything.

I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that any mother just stop worrying about her children, or expect to be able to extinguish those protective instincts. It does help, however, to know first of all that other women struggle with the same powerless feelings and protective thoughts, and secondly to know that fretting, staying awake and checking actually do nothing at all to keep our children safe. By the time our kids are old enough to be out without us, or are living away from home, we’ve done everything we can to instil in them a sense of responsibility and the knowledge they need to look after ourselves. The only effect the worrying has is to drain us of energy, peace of mind and time. And if we let it get out of hand, it can affect our relationships, both with our children and with others in our family.

Now, I may be the ‘worry lady,’ and I am always talking and writing about the fact that worry is pointless and bad for us, but my Teenager is my weak spot and he’s often out at night as he’s in a band. It would be unrealistic for me to expect myself not to worry at all. But I do keep it to an absolute minimum, and I don’t feel guilty if I ‘forget’ to worry. Parenting is partly about preparing our kids to be able to deal with the big world, to learn to be independent adults, and so a lot of the parenting I do now is around letting go, focussing on my own life and recognising that he’s going his own way now.

If you worry like this about your children, or think that you might do when they are older, how would it be if you reduced the worry, just by ten percent? Would you get more sleep, be less irritable or just plain happier? And once you had made that reduction, you could get it down just a little more. Believe me, learning to worry a lot less, or even not at all a lot of the time, is possible. We have control over our thinking but many of us don’t know this. We think we ‘can’t help worrying,’ and, as long as we think that, we will not be able to do a thing about our worrying. Knowing that we can do something about it is the first step to freedom.

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