Finding Resilience in Strong Personal Relationships

The author discusses how relationships change when children leave home and the challenges that can arise. The author shares their personal experience of feeling lonely and overwhelmed after their children moved out. They coped by working harder, but it negatively affected their relationship with their spouse. The author reflects on their choices and realizes that they should have focused on maintaining a strong relationship with their spouse instead of taking on more work. Despite the challenges, the author considers their family a success. Hello, my name's Diane Holliday and I'm going to read you a blog that I've written for Jeremy. All relationships change, we discover new things and want to experience different aspects of life so we grow, hopefully, together. This is not always the case. Big changes in the family patterns may mean that a couple, however devoted, may need to take a fresh look at living together with a new degree of harmony. After children leave home, a couple will have a few new possibilities, dreams and aspirations, sometimes producing stress and feelings of loneliness. This is more so if the partners have different desires for the future. When my three children, all close together in age, left to find their feet, my way of coping was to work harder and take on longer hours and a more demanding job role. While it was to use the time that I used to be taken up with cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing for five and then only for two, I had to fill my day somehow. This caused me to be exhausted with little or no energy for my husband, in fact it made me less of a person. I missed being a mum and I forgot I was a wife. Our love life suffered and it was only due to my husband's tenacity that we held on and found common ground. On reflection, I am now very aware that my way of coping was to obliterate the immense loneliness I felt. After being a mother and a big part of my family for 25 years, it took courage to see that the next part of my life could be better, or at least as good, but certainly different. Keeping a beneficial relationship going with each child became a little strained as they wanted to cut away and I wanted more contact than they were willing to give. Compromise, once again we learn how to manage things with cooperation, not treading on toes but also unwilling to walk on glass. Not all families are like mine, some sail through the adventure, even have holidays together and generally cope much better than I did. My efforts at setting my family free were not the best way to deal with the situation, now I know that, making some special time for just the two of us would have been a much better choice. Not taking on too much work to deaden the pain, talking together about the future and making plans would have been much better options, I know that now. So nearly 40 years on I still have my family, they are all normal, decent human beings, I call that a success.