After decades of sacrifice and unconditional love, discovering that your own grown children have become the source of your deepest exhaustion might be the most heartbreaking realization of later life.
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There's a peculiar contradiction that emerges after sixty: the people we love most deeply can sometimes be the ones who drain us most completely.
And when those people happen to be our own children, the ones we raised and shaped and worried over for decades, the complexity becomes almost unbearable.
I've been thinking about this lately, especially after a conversation with a friend who confessed, tears streaming down her face, that she was considering limiting contact with her adult son. "What kind of mother does that make me?" she asked, and I understood her anguish completely.
We're taught that parental love should be unconditional, that good mothers never give up, never step back, never protect themselves from their own children. But what happens when that child, now grown, becomes someone who consistently brings chaos, manipulation, or toxicity into your life?
When love becomes enabling
The hardest truth I've learned about parenting adult children is that sometimes our love becomes the very thing that prevents them from growing. After my husband died, I made the mistake of leaning too heavily on my eldest.
He was just a boy, really, but I started calling him "the man of the house," expecting him to fill shoes that were far too big for his young feet. Years later, I had to apologize for that burden I'd placed on him, for making him grow up too fast, for using him as an emotional crutch when I should have been his shelter.
But here's what I've noticed: sometimes we swing too far in the other direction. We feel so guilty about our past mistakes that we let our adult children take advantage of us indefinitely.
We excuse their behavior, cover their debts, accept their disrespect, all because we're trying to make up for something we did or didn't do twenty years ago. A former colleague once told me, "Guilt is a terrible compass," and she was right. When we navigate our relationships through guilt rather than wisdom, we often end up lost.
The weight of watching them struggle
Shakespeare wrote in King Lear, "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child." But I'd argue there's something even sharper: watching your child make the same mistakes you made, knowing they won't listen to your warnings, knowing they have to learn their own lessons the hard way.
My daughter went through a period in her thirties where she seemed determined to repeat every relationship mistake I'd ever made. I watched her choose partners who diminished her, stay in situations that clearly weren't serving her, make excuses for behavior that made my stomach turn with recognition.
The urge to intervene was overwhelming. But when I tried to share my concerns, she'd look at me with those eyes that said, "You don't understand my life, Mom."
And maybe she was right. Maybe I didn't understand her life, just as my mother hadn't understood mine. But watching her struggle without being able to help felt like drowning in slow motion. Some nights I'd lie awake wondering if this was my punishment for all the times I'd ignored my own mother's advice.
When boundaries feel like betrayal
Have you ever noticed how the word "boundaries" can make parents of adult children flinch? We spent so many years without boundaries, changing diapers at 3 AM, dropping everything for school emergencies, reorganizing our entire lives around their needs.
The idea of suddenly saying "no" to them feels fundamentally wrong, like we're betraying the very essence of parenthood.
But here's what I've discovered: boundaries aren't walls, they're more like garden fences. They define where one person's responsibility ends and another's begins. When my son went through his divorce, he started calling me multiple times a day, sometimes late at night, always in crisis mode.
At first, I answered every call, offered every solution, absorbed every emotion he couldn't handle. Then one day, exhausted and depleted, I realized I was preventing him from developing his own coping mechanisms. I had to learn to say, "I love you, but I can't be your therapist. Let's talk tomorrow when we've both had some rest."
It felt cruel in the moment. It felt like abandonment. But sometimes the kindest thing we can do for our adult children is to stop cushioning every fall.
The grief of who they might have been
Perhaps the most unexpected aspect of having difficult relationships with adult children is the grief. Not just grief for the relationship you have, but grief for the relationship you imagined you'd have. All those dreams of cozy Sunday dinners, of being the grandmother who's welcomed with open arms, of having adult children who are also friends.
When my son married someone I had reservations about, I spent months grieving the daughter-in-law I'd imagined, the one who'd want to go shopping with me, who'd call for my recipes, who'd include me naturally in their lives.
The irony, of course, is that his wife turned out to be wonderful in ways I hadn't expected, and my reservations were more about my own expectations than her actual character. That's a lesson in humility I wrote about in my post on letting go of control.
But for some parents, that grief is ongoing. Their adult children remain distant, troubled, or hostile despite years of effort, therapy, and attempted reconciliation. The child they raised seems to have disappeared, replaced by someone they barely recognize.
Finding peace without resolution
Do you know what nobody tells you about setting boundaries with your adult children?
Sometimes there is no Hollywood ending. Sometimes they don't have an epiphany and thank you for your tough love. Sometimes they don't come around. Sometimes the distance you create for your own wellbeing becomes permanent, and you have to find a way to live with that.
I've learned that peace doesn't always come with resolution. Sometimes it comes with acceptance. Accepting that you did the best you could with what you knew at the time.
Accepting that your children are separate people with their own paths to walk, even if those paths lead away from you. Accepting that loving someone doesn't mean sacrificing your own wellbeing on the altar of their choices.
Final thoughts
The decision to create distance from an adult child is never simple and never without pain. It challenges everything we believe about motherhood, about unconditional love, about family bonds that should withstand anything.
But sometimes, after sixty years of life experience, we've earned the right to protect our peace, to preserve our energy for the years we have left, to choose relationships that nourish rather than deplete us.
Even when those choices involve the very people we brought into this world. Perhaps especially then.
