So you’ve been divorced awhile. Your children are young adults. Your ex is remarried. You are with someone as well and starting a new career. You’ve launched. Life should be cruising now. No more bumps! Right?

Well - life will be life. There are moments that are going to be tough. And you may ask, why now? After many years when things seemed to go really smoothly (or was that just a memory) you may be asking why does this year feel so hard, so difficult? What is different now? Am I different? Are they different? Or is everyone simply the same, only more so? During the holidays that stress may seem so intense that you wonder, how did it get this way again?

Let me start by saying, you are not alone, and you are human. We all have moments when we fall back into the habits of our former selves and our long term relationships. We fall into the roles that we lived out with our parents, our siblings, our kids and our ex-spouses. Emotions from long ago bubble up. They are always part of our story. 

Our children will bring us joy, and they also bring us frustration and challenge. What kind of relationship do we have with them now? What kind of relationship do we want with them, and do we really have control over that relationship?  

As a divorce coach, and a divorced mom of three emerging adults in their twenties, I struggle as I hear the pain in my clients’ stories that often resembles the pain I experience in my own life. What I urge my clients to acknowledge is that children in their twenties are thinkers on their own. They are building their own identities. These young adults are struggling to be distinct from their parents, or one of their parents. And that may hurt if you feel like you are the parent they are pulling away from. You may feel your children are acting very self-focused.  This is likely because they are struggling with the instability of their age. They have so many choices and options, that they don’t know which way to turn. They want to be babied, but not babied.  Spoiled, but left alone. These behaviors characterize a newly identified developmental-stage called “emerging adulthood”.  There are 5 characteristics that distinguish emerging adulthood from other life stages:

1. The age of identity exploration

2. The age of instability

3. The self-focused age

4. The age of feeling in-between and

5. The age of possibilities

During the holidays, when we hope that our children come “home”, we may be asking them to come to homes they never grew up in.  We want them to feel like WE are their home, but they are looking for something else. So how do we navigate our way through their new life stage.

Here are three options:

• Take a deep breath.  First and foremost - keep breathing. This is a stage. It will pass. Even though it is hard to handle now, they will get through it and so will you.

• Remind yourself that you also were a young adult. You may not have behaved the same way your children are behaving, and you also may not have lived through the same life experiences your children lived through.  How can you find a way to have compassion for your children while finding a way to have compassion for yourself? Make a list.

• Write your own story about how you designed your life after divorce, and consider it a potential blueprint for conversation with your “emerging adult”.

• You went through an identity exploration - who am I now?

• This post-divorce chapter began as an age of instability - everything you thought you knew was changed, and you had to build a new, solid foundation so that the ground beneath your feet would stop shifting. Maybe you are still working on that foundation.

• You spent time focusing on yourself during this redesign, AND you continued to focus on others - self-focus but not to the exclusion of the rest of the people in your life.  It is possible.

• You can acknowledge that feeling “in between” is disorienting. When you have choices to make you may feel that making one choice forecloses the opportunity to make other choices. In coaching we learn that one choice does not foreclose that possibility. Instead we ask, what makes you think that one choice closes the door on another? Each step forward is a learning experience. And you can learn that something is not right for you, and pivot to something else.

• Finally, you can offer your life as an example of the power of possibility. LIfe wasn’t over for you when divorce came into your life, whether it was your choice or not. You took action and made adjustments and changes.  

That’s the power of your experience and how you can build a new kind of relationship with your emerging adult children.  Share your stories, when they are open to receiving them. Notice the moments that they are in the self-focused zone, and avoid the big conversations then.  Maybe acknowledge the challenges they face with all the possibilities and choices they have to make. Tell them - it’s hard.  And it’s worth it.  And when you say those words to them, take them to heart. Listen to them yourself as reminders for you too. It’s hard. And it’s worth it.