I’m honored to share my Faith & Resilience: Finding Hope in Challenging Times keynote at the annual, esteemed Faith & Life series on Thursday March 27th, 2025 from 7-8 PM CST. (Fun fact, Daryl Strawberry was the featured speaker last month!) Add the event to your calendar and save this link to connect to the livestream.
During this time of year, so many families with school kids are taking spring break vacations. In honor of that tradition, I thought I’d take a little break and reprint an article I wrote about my latest spring break vacation with Lisa last year. Thanks for reading! And thanks for tuning in for my talk!
The Empty Nest
My wife and I recently moved into some prime life-cycle real-estate. At the intersection of “Launched Kids Street,” and “Pretty Good Health Road” you’ll find Lisa and me doing life together on the Empty Nest side of the street. The grass is pretty green over here! We just got back from our first solo vacation.
The Empty Nest: When All Your Fantasies Come True?
So how would you have imagined spending your very first kids-free holiday in twenty-nine years? I’m trying to remember how I might have fantasized about such things while shivering on a soccer sideline, or basting at a baseball doubleheader? If you’re still in the middle of the “Couples with Small Children, or Families with School-Aged Children Phases, where do your unrequited weekend fantasies take you? If you’ve fully fledged your brood, then back in the booming, banging, buzzing days of schlepping, scrimping, and scrubbing, to what distant shores would you have cast your imagination? Maybe back then, you would have paused and fantasized about sleeping in, and coming to consciousness with full-throated…condo-doors-wide-opened…non-rushed…coitus…with no interruptus? Conversely, you may have looked down into a future when all that Dave Matthew’s “Crashing into Me” business was behind the both of you and real pleasure could involve comfy PJ’s and second desserts?
How Lisa and I Spent Our Spring Break Vacation
So, how do you think Lisa and I chose to live out our long-awaited marital fantasies? What new and exotic horizons did we explore together last week? Answer: we returned to the Orlando, Florida time-share, where we’ve spent nearly every Spring-break vacation with our kids for twenty-five years, and basically did all the same things we’ve always done! At least at first.
It started off bittersweet when confronting favorite old landmarks, like this,
Tom: “Remember Lizzie at the sunset hoola-hoop contest?”
Lisa: Ya, she had that cute little hair wrap!”
Tom: “I thought that was Annalise?
Lisa: “She had one too!”
Then came the vague feeling of something missing that we tried to wall paper over.
Tom: “At least John Harry won’t be getting us up at six-in-the-morning to shoot hoops before anybody wakes up!”
Mom: “We get to sleep in!”
Finally, we ended up using a kind of reverse-psychology technique where we feigned relief at being rid of our pesky kids, like this,
Tom: “Remember how awful that was, when we’d wrap their little swimsuit-bodies in layers of towels, for their naps, and we’d be stuck sitting next to them, reading a novel in the sun while they slept?”
Lisa: “Ya! That was terrible! And remember when they’d wake up, and you’d pretend to be asleep and they’d paint your toe nails pink and giggle the whole time?
Tom: “I hated that!” I’m so glad that won’t happen this week!”
Lisa: “Me too!”
grief with a small “g.”
Have you ever noticed how every new beginning starts with an ending? Even a long awaited, welcomed transition brings with it a certain amount of letting go. As time goes on, an awful lot of happiness is predicated on how you carry the inevitable grief that will unavoidably insinuate itself into your days.
Just to be clear, adjusting to a kid-free vacation represents a kind of “lower case” grief at best. It could never be confused with the capital, “G,” Grief that accompanies death, relationship termination, or a health crisis. Nonetheless, the skill set for dealing with it, is worthy of some reflection. Knowing how to cope with small, “g,” grief can mark the difference between an “A+” vacation, and a “C-“ one. It’s the difference between accepting reality just the way it is, or railing against it. Anyone worthy of a license in my profession will tell you about the happiness paradox. Acknowledging and accepting unhappiness has a way of making room for more happiness! Grief is like that too. Accepting it, and allowing it to flow through you makes it smaller. It also frees up energy to mobilize action that fits the current moment.
It seems to me that grief is best considered as an artifact of attachment. Saint Paul asked the question, “Oh Death, where is your sting” (1 Cor 15: 55)? The answer? It’s right there, next to the love! Ask anybody in my profession of psychotherapy. If you love big, you’re gonna grieve big! If you love small, you’ll end up grieving anyway…and probably in a more complicated way than if you just would have loved with your whole heart to begin with!
Some Advice for small “g” grief: notice, name, acknowledge, nurture
The skill set for dealing with that sting, large or small, is not found in the memorization of steps or phases, or complicated intellectual modeling. It involves the same skills that build healthy attachments as in intimacy with self, others, or God. It involves taking the time to notice the movements going on inside. It requires finding some way to name those movements. Ideally, it would include acknowledgingwhat you’ve named to a trusted friend and allowing that friend to nurture you.
…then…Do the Next Right Thing
On our vacation, Lisa and I were lucky enough to have brought precisely that kind of trusted friend along with us: each other! We found what my clients have found over the years. The noticing, naming, acknowledging, and nurturing, has a way of organically resolving into the doing of the next right thing. We eventually came to the conclusion that we needed to make some new memories. We discovered a previously unknown nature preserve nearby. A long hike through swampland featured a twelve-foot alligator and several of his eight-foot nieces and nephews. The huge snout of that ancient denizen, could have swallowed a VW Bug whole! During a toddler’s worst grocery store tantrum, you might think of taking him on that walk, but you’d never really do it…. At this phase of life, on the other side of our grief, we found that we get to be badass adventurers again! And as befits our new station in life, we downloaded a birding app! Could this be the advent of a new hobby? Empty nest voyeurs spying on actual nesters? Only the next vacation will tell! I’ll keep you posted.
Dialogue
· Can you tell the story of a grief experience (great or small ) and the wisdom you accumulated from it?
· Do you engage in a regular practice of sitting still and noticing what’s going on in your heart, or your body? Describe your characteristic ways of doing that?
· What is your palette for naming your inner movements of the heart? For example, do you tend to use sensory metaphors, or do you apply the standard counseling terms for feelings (e.g. variations on mad, sad, glad, scared)?
· Who is (or are) your “go to” person (or people ) in acknowledging what’s going on inside of you? How frequently do you share with them?
· Can you a name a time, when your process of noticing, naming, acknowledging, andnurturing led to an organic doing of the next right thing?
· Are you grieving anything at this time in your life?