Video Transcript
One of the big things that is gonna come up for you, comes up for all of us, is the loss and the grief around what you hoped would happen in your life and what you hoped for your children, and what you hoped for yourself when your grandkids come to live with you. How you thought life was gonna be isn’t the way it is.
And so that’s the first loss, and that’s huge. And it’s always gonna be there to a certain extent.
So not only is your life not the way you expected it to be, but your children—the parents—aren’t succeeding like you had hoped. That’s probably the primary one.
The secondary one is you thought you were gonna have a time in your life to take care of yourself and do what you wanted to do after your kids succeeded and were on their way. And now you are raising a grandchild, and you’re probably in your sixties or seventies, sometimes even eighties.
And so you’re continuing to do this by choice. And by doing that, you’re gonna experience a lot of losses along the way. The first and foremost being your own child, and then the loss of life as it was.
But also the loss of your grandchild experiencing that connection between their parent. Everything you attend at school, every performance you attend, every milestone that happens, you’re gonna feel that loss of the parent not being there. And that idea of, “Oh, I’m here. This is what I’m doing.”
And so what I would encourage is to acknowledge it when you’re feeling it. Talk about it if you can with somebody. Let yourself have the feelings. It’s okay, it’s normal. You might even be angry, you might be sad, you might be anxious. Whatever it is, acknowledge it and talk to somebody.
And then focus on what’s in front of you and do the best that you can with what you have.
It’s all natural. It doesn’t feel natural because it’s a different normal, but the grief and the loss are natural and they will be a part of it. They’re going to be, because you continue to find those parts of yourself and the relationship that you have with these children that you’re raising that expose what isn’t and what is.
