3 Mantras Your Heart Needs When You Say Goodbye To Your Kids For The Weekend

For a mom in a two-address family, there’s a feeling you get when you hold your kids right before they leave for their other home.  You know what I mean, right?  It’s a pull.  It feels primal.  I find myself taking in the smell of their hair and feeling the warmth of their bodies with much greater attention.  It can ache in me.  If feels like a pulling apart of taffy.  It’s strong and then as the time nears it gets stringy and more stretched out. 

When you first get divorced, people tell you this goodbye process will only get easier as you practice it more.  That’s partly true.  It will only get easier to the degree that you align yourself with it in a way that opens you to it getting easier.  How do we do that?  Being students of how we think about the situation and how we talk to ourselves in it. 

Right after your kids leave again for their other home, take an inventory of your inner dialogue.  

What messages are you allowing, fueling, and sitting with?  

This dialogue is your starting place.  Simply being aware of the thoughts that you nurture gives you a separate place from which to evaluate which ones are serving you best as you head into a few days away from them.

If in that process you see a few thoughts that aren’t leading you to the place you most want to be, try on these three thought possibilities and see if they can’t be the new mantras for those moments when you say goodbye.

1.    I’m saying goodbye to my kids, but I can say hello to something else.  These empty home, clear schedule days have a way of pointing out in large print what is missing.  When we are saying goodbye to our kids this vacant space is part of what we are dreading.  Our kids – their stories, pains, delights, dramas, and demands – shape our days and nights.  When those stories, pains, delights, dramas, and demands head to another address for a short time, we experience the blank space that remains.  Newsflash – we don’t need to fill the space.  If you do that too quickly it will only remind you that you are trying to fill a space that can’t be filled.  Try on the idea of welcoming something in.  Saying hello to something that is stopping by.  I had weekends where what I needed was some serious grief processing and tears.  I had to say hello to what I couldn’t process when the kids were around.  I had weekends where I said hello to productivity and the to do lists were cleared.  Ask yourself, when I say goodbye to my kids this weekend, what do I want to say hello to?

2.    Despite what my former partner can’t be, I do appreciate that when my kids are with their other parent this weekend they will get the following positive experiences or exposures…  I know you’re clear on everything that is going to get dropped, ruined, threatened, and forgotten this weekend by your other parent.  It’s a major reason why the goodbye is so painful.  You know that if you could stay in the driver’s seat, the kids would have a better experience.  While that might be true, your former partner is not all bad.  This is one of the hardest truths that divorced moms contend with.  We don’t want to give credit to the other parent for what they can do well, because to do so diminishes our right to be a victim of their poor behavior.  Time to drop the victim status.  What does your child’s other parent do well?  Celebrate that.  Celebrate it in your own heart, and let your kids know out loud that you’re grateful they get to experience that while they are gone from you.

3.    I love that I love my kids this much.  You don’t need this to be easier.  You don’t want to love them less.  There are plenty of people want to run away from their kids.  The gift is that you want to run toward yours.  The flame in your heart that is lit only for your kids is a glorious flame.  Don’t seek to dim it.  Thank goodness you have this connection to them!  What a blessing to be so alive to them that the distance is felt.  

Don’t try to convince yourself that your goodbyes will get better if you could just accept it and move on.  This is a process.  How you narrate this process is vital to your surviving it.  Peek into your inner dialogue the next time you’re saying goodbye and see what you notice.  Reworking a few of the lines might lead you to a story you’d like to live in.