What to Expect When You're Expecting Them to Launch
It was 5:00 a.m., and I could almost discern the outline of her face in the glow of the hotel clock. I was finally settling into sleep. Even after five days in Beijing and then a couple of days in the eastern province of Jiangsu, circadian rhythms had not yet surrendered to the time zone. Sometime during the few minutes I had finally dozed, the one-year-old baby, wide-awake next to me in the queen size bed, had rolled close. Her hand gripped my thumb. In that moment, I knew that her movement toward me had been intentional. Twelve months in an orphanage crib, between 2002 and 2003, a survivor of the 1990s one-child policy in China and still, she knew how to connect. I worked hard to nurture her every need.
In the days and weeks that followed with Lydia I would experience the symbiosis I had learned to call parenthood. The late pediatrician and psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott would describe Primary Maternal Preoccupation - the unflappable fixation of the mother towards the infant,[1]. Winnicott was speaking of the early weeks of postpartum experiences. Lydia may not have been a newborn, born from my body, yet I was definitely preoccupied in a manner reminiscent of newborn/mother bonding. My daughter cried; I jumped. I laughed; she looked my way. Her undernourished muscles had begun to develop into crawl-worthy legs. She scooted towards plushy toys. She pulled herself up to perform a baby-size gymnastic feat. She looked back to assure herself that I was watching the circus act. Several months into this pas-de-deux, I sobbed for ten minutes in a parking lot. The nursery close to my office promised to be “mom away from mom.” I didn’t buy it.
This little one had not been my first rodeo. Five years earlier I had birthed Lydia’s sibling in a narrow hospital bed. The experience had been complete with many of the late 20th-century birthing elements: white-knuckled pain softened slightly with an epidural, blood, a well-intentioned and hovering partner, and, of course, the umbilical cord. Through that protective sheath, through two arteries and an umbilical vein, my body had been tethered to the body of a growing fetus for 39 weeks, had enabled the baby to experience the inflow and outflow of nutrients and waste. I had even learned somewhere that my mental status – flow state, high anxiety, or the ennui of most days - was passed on to this little one.
What followed the birth of my first baby were weeks and months of emotional and physical enmeshment. Mothers know this experience. The baby - damp, sweaty in an angry hunger fit, sucking raw the nipple - mirrors the mother’s own distress at this steep learning curve of relationship. The growing infant sees her mother’s face, and, somewhere around six weeks, smiles on purpose because the mother has smiled. Then the exhausted mother responds to this sign of connection, perhaps with delighted laughter or with words of love. The symbiosis continues. The Primary Maternal Preoccupation is unbreakable. There is no separating one from the other. Like Jean-Luc Picard as the Borg (in my generation’s Star Trek narrative of enmeshment), a parent knows in her gut: “Resistance is futile. Your life, as it has been, is over. From this time forward you will service us.” When up against an all-consuming life force known as a child, we have been warned.
Motherhood landed me into a perpetual state of hyper-awareness regarding the other. I developed a superpower known to many parents, a sixth sense about another human being. Thoughts of little people trailed me to sleep at night and into dreamland, to the grocery store and into work calls. In those early years of parenthood, my budget reflected more money spent on childcare than on housing. For years, two-thirds of my mind would be present to the details of the board meeting at work. The remaining part had been left at home at the kitchen table where tomorrow’s science project was being constructed and where field trip permission slips still needed to be signed. I had moved from being a fully functional independent adult to becoming an inextricable part of a collective. Indeed, my life, as it had been, was over. Resistance was futile.
*****
Heidi Murkhoff’s 1984 edition of What To Expect When You’re Expecting still sits on my bookshelf[2]. For 21st-century expectant parents, pregnancy information is disseminated through the internet. Formerly, in the 1980s and 1990s, expectant mothers borrowed the book from friends who had just given birth, expectant parents used the public library to glean what they needed from mother gurus. Even now, in the 2020s, expectant parents still read books. In June 2015, What to Expect When You’re Expecting became the longest running title of all time on the New York Times bestseller list[3]. Murkoff’s work is now in its 5th edition. 22 million readers have gained vital knowledge and confidence about those 40 weeks of gestation and growth. 38 countries and 44 languages digest Murkoff’s advice and facts about pregnancy and the growing life inside. The website whattoexpect.com touts itself as “the most trusted pregnancy and parenting brand.” The What to Expect wisdom has been a lifeline – even a bible of sorts - for parents learning to understand this symbiotic connection.
Mother and child cannot always remain enmeshed. Any healthy parent knows this. A mother’s sanity, her wellbeing, depends on moments spent away from the collective. So does the child’s. The What to Expect series understands this. As my babies grew I flipped through the pages of What To Expect in the First Year and What to Expect in the Toddler Years. Not surprisingly, I had much less time and attention to read these pages. Once the baby arrives, most parents have little time for theoretical learning. Feet are on the ground running. Still, Murkhoff, with her extended series, has tried to prepare millions of parents for nurturing young growing lives in the steps moving towards independence.
Along my own journey, child number one, a child who was assigned male at birth, was my first teacher for this individuation process. This offspring of mine has since begun her transition to the young woman she has always sensed herself to be (this story of parenting a transitioning adult demands its own complete article). Her chosen name is Sofie. When Sofie was somewhere just past the toddler twos, in her growing independence, she became famous in my family lore. As the story goes, Sofie mouthed off to me. “Go away!” she barked fiercely one morning in the kitchen, angry with me for some sort of directive. Then, in sudden horror, perhaps at the power of her spoken voice, the three-year-old edited the command. “Not far away!” It was her short-hand way of saying I have my own thoughts, feelings, needs, desires, wants, ideas, agenda – but I’m scared without your touch in my life. Thus began my conscious awareness of our unfolding dance steps. It was my job to ultimately separate from these little ones, to raise them in such a way that they no longer needed my watchful eye, my structuring routines. Although I hoped that Sofie and Lydia would never be “far away,” my children would need to “go away.
*****.
On a cold February morning towards the end of the first year of the pandemic, a mother sat in my office for family therapy[4]. The box of tissues from Costco was nearly empty. Certainly, over the years, the forty-nine-year-old mom had invested well in her son, now twenty-three-years-old. Photographs on her iPhone introduced me to a series of pictures from his infancy, toddler years, school age, high school graduation, family vacations. She had poured into his successes as the captain of his soccer team in high school. This mother reported that she was his biggest fan after every break-up or every success at work. Despite the joys, we also were processing the recent middle finger her son had given when my client had refused to Venmo him more money. Recently mom had discovered that any extra money that she sent to him went towards a substance abuse habit. For several months my work with this distressed mother had focused on boundaries. The kind of boundaries that, when kept, can mitigate damage. For instance, setting her phone to sleep mode at night would both ensure that she gets a full eight hours and that her son would not have access to her midnight empathy. Today this mother was committed to keeping her relationship with young adult child, but she was also committed to keeping her thumbs away from the banking app. She told me that this kind of boundary hurt, because with it came the risk of losing communication with her child, at least for a season. However, I reminded her that a strong boundary is necessary at times if parents and their adult children are to move into a healthy relationship, one that allows all parties to thrive into their potential.
The mother didn’t need the money she was giving to her son. She did need to honor herself and the decisions she had always made to assist his health. She thought that she had raised him to honestly face his struggles. She thought that she had always modeled healthy emotions and a healthy body, a very different lifestyle than her son’s recent weekend cocaine binges portrayed. In the privacy of my office, as we peeled back the layers of this launching season, my client gradually moved to a place of radical acceptance. She had done her best to invest in the growing life of her son, and today her hands needed to release him in a stance of trust. She began to see this widening gap between them as a necessary part of the young adult’s individuation. In every stage of his childhood, she had encouraged his independence. That his current independence threatened to enslave him to an addiction was still not reason enough to return to a state of Primary Maternal Preoccupation. She had a life to live as an almost-fifty-year old woman. This life meant learning to tolerate the distress of her own inability to change her child. He was living out his own lessons of taking responsibility for an adult life, a life that sometimes can twist into a murky path of challenges and pitfalls.
Every parent who has invested in the collective must learn how to now divest time, energy, and resources as adult children launch. Parents who have experienced for several decades the enmeshment of emotions, values, calendar, living space, spiritual and religious ritual, even bacteria and household germs, now must retrain their relationship muscles to let go. Ideally, parent and child have been expanding the gap between one another in steady, incremental movements. From the exit of the birth canal to the first day of school, from learning to pass or fail biology without mom’s intervention to taking responsibility for the first speeding ticket, the space between parent and child is intended to widen. Ideally, that space increases in a healthy, albeit bumpy, way.
In the launching process two extremes can emerge. One is the extreme of proximal enmeshment. This happens when adult child and parent visit, text, call, check up on, follow on social media, and basically share physical or virtual space in a tethered sort of way. Many factors – usually connected to the anxiety of the parent, the anxiety of the young adult, or both – can keep parent and child stuck like glue in each other’s day-to-day orbits. The stereotypical face of this adult-child/parent proximal enmeshment is the 27-year-old living in the basement, raiding the fridge at night. It is fictional Howard Wolowitz from the 2010’s Big Bang Theory and his off-screen mom, Mrs. Wolowitz who rev each other up from different rooms under one roof[5]. Proximal enmeshment is the always-in-each-other’s-business kind of dance.
A second extreme of enmeshment does not need close quarters. In fact, this other extreme may not seem like enmeshment at all. Ironically, it comes when the cutting knife is wielded. The adult daughter bellows, “You’re dead to me!” as she pushes out the door, threatening a Grand Canyon-sized gap. She moves out, blocks numbers and social media accounts, doesn’t call with updates because the conversations are painful. Yet ironically, despite the seeming distance, parent and adult child are nonetheless enmeshed. Mom still jumps every time the phone rings. Daughter tries to avoid “acting just like mom,” but from three states away, she finds herself irritable on a particular anniversary or date. In cut-off enmeshment, from different parts of the globe, each party is stuck – usually in memories and patterns that each one tries to avoid. The play is like the old kid’s game: “Sit in a corner and try not to think about a pink elephant.” Of course that’s all you can do. With cut-off enmeshment, the harder you run, the more quickly your emotions get jerked back to home base. Cut-off enmeshment can lead to the parent’s overwhelming emotions in the absence of the child. The further away the child seems, the more intensely the emotions boil. This state of relationship is a place of great angst.
Differentiation of self is what family systems theorist Murray Bowen says is a necessary component of healthy family relationships[6]. It is that sweet spot of balance between individuals. Self-Differentiation is an ideal for a marriage, for a friendship, for an adult-child/parent relationship. It is that state of being present to the other and yet being true to self. The self-differentiated parent says, “I don’t understand where you are coming from. Tell me more.” The self-differentiated adult child is the one who says, “Mom, I’ve got to get back to my apartment, but dinner was great. Thanks.” And in this relationship, mom may feel sadness when her daughter has left for the evening, but she knows how to soothe herself. The young adult may reach out to dad when the first day of a new job has gone well. When dad asks about young adult’s budget, the differentiated child calmly remarks, “I’ve got enough. Thanks for asking.” Or “I’m not sure I can get through a month on this salary. Can you help?” To this question, the self-differentiated parent responds, “This is what I can do to help.” Conversely, he admits, “This is something I cannot do.” The differentiated relationship involves respect of self and respect of the other. Such connection involves honesty with self and honesty with the other. It involves self-control and ways to care for self when the other does not meet your needs. The healthy relationship is fostered when the parent can acknowledge, as my client did, that she has done the very best she could. The work of differentiating from our kids is nothing short of difficult.
*******
In the summer of 2021, both of my children launched in big ways within weeks of each other. The youngest, Lydia, the one who introduced me to adoption clinics and support groups of interracial families 18 years ago, has been made of global dreams. She had planned to spend her senior year of high school in France as an exchange student. However, like the other 3 million 2021 public high school graduates in the U.S.[7], the last year and a half of Lydia’s public education career had been upended by pandemic measures. When Covid-19 halted her international high school plans, my youngest daughter sat in front of the computer at home in Akron, Ohio. She completed those mandatory on-line requirements for graduation. After school hours, she masked up for the service industry job at Starbucks that would fund her plans. In August 2021, with a high school diploma in hand, a well-earned scholarship at an international university, loosened pandemic measures, and a modest bank account, Lydia boarded a plane for Madrid, Spain where she began her undergraduate life. Another continent was not my first plan for an Asian-American daughter. Especially during this era of heightened Sinophobia all around the world. But what 19-year-old consults the parent’s first plan, or any plan of the parent for that matter? I took a deep breath of quivering tears and drove away from the airport.
That same summer, Lydia’s sister Sofie was launching into choppier waters. The pandemic had forced my recent college graduate back home while she taught part time for the 2020 – 2021 academic year. By the summer of 2021, economics, pandemic stress, increased tensions with her parents, career dreams beyond her small rustbelt city, and a growing certainty about her gender identity erupted in a summer of torrent. Four weeks before Lydia flew the coop, Sofie, then 23, packed her Honda Fit with a few clothes, laptop, and her little dog in the passenger seat. She backed quickly out of the driveway. My first born gave no forwarding address. I only knew that she was bound for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, ten hours away by car. This was cut-off. I trusted she would find a connection in the graduate program that had wooed her so far away to those hinterlands. Several months passed before I got word only in a group email to extended family that she was settled and yes, she had begun hormone replacement therapy. It was many more months before I would get an emotional phone call at 4:00 a.m. And then a few more. The communication was jerky for well over a year until we finally settled into a new and more differentiated pattern of parent-child connection.
Heidi Murkoff has no wisdom for the parent who remains back home in the proverbial empty nest. There is no What to Expect When Expecting Them to Launch. No cute little charts. No pithy wisdom complete with illustrations. That absence of handbook is indicative of the struggle. Handbooks help you feel in control. Launching is a period of life when a parent releases such control. For a couple of months in the fall of 2021, without any guide, I sat in awe of the silence in the house. There was a loud quiet from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, from where the phone never would ring. Madrid, Spain offered a gentler silence, broken now and then by direct messages on Instagram. Please help with rent. Smile emoji. In my own home, a wall hanging, a photograph of my once-little-people, would suddenly bring a twinge of grief. A glance in the mirror at my graying hair surprised. I considered how two decades prior, hip-deep in diapers and primary-colored toys, I never imagined this strange world of grown and flown, days without their daily noise. Who could have prepared any parent to launch young adults into the post-pandemic, politically-divided, economically-challenged world that is now 2023? In the months since August 2021, I have talked with other parents. Peers of mine also reorient to new rhythms, the ebb and flow of anxiety, scarce phone calls, stints back in the basement, and an occasional family therapy session in which to work it all out.
Psychologist Mark McConville describes the “inner world transformation” that happens with young adults[8]. McConville is best known for his 2020 book Failure to Launch: Why Your Twentysomething Hasn’t Grown Up…and What to Do About It. This phrase refers to the change unseen to the observers’ eyes, the change in perspective, the imagined challenges, the shifting self-narrative that happens in the psyche of the late teen or early twenty-something when entering the new terrain of adulthood. This psychologist in private practice asserts that launching in the 21st century is really a decade-long process, give or take a few years. McConville, now a grandfather, describes his own trepidation years ago, as a 21-year-old, coming home for school break, now wearing an “adult” pair of wing-tipped shoes. His inner anxiety was alert to potential ribbing from his younger brother, he was afraid of being found out as a “poser.”[9]
In each generation, such anxiety erupts when the emerging adult begins to see him or herself differently yet unsure of the fit into former structures. I remember my own “inner world transformation” around the age of 19 when dining with a friend in a local restaurant, one that was richer than my blood. I was not yet old enough to drink at the bar, yet I was old enough to enjoy the trendy, upscale appetizers and desserts sold at this little uptown bistro. I worried about the bill total that would come, feigning ease with my slightly older friend. I knew that I had crossed some invisible line into adulthood. It was exhilarating and anxiety-provoking all at once, this new landscape that might or might not accept my entrance.
Anxiety does strange things to our internal parenting voices and even stranger things to our relationships. In private practice for family counseling, when sitting with a client who is stuck in indecision, in stalemate, or in communication crisis with offspring, I frequently ask, “What do you fear the most?” This thread of questioning helps my conversation partner to track down the pending catastrophe. After a session or so of wondering about launching we uncover the catastrophe that such fear has constructed. When confronted with an adult child’s job choice, for instance, a parent somehow jumps from worries about the child’s ability to pay the rent to great existential concerns. “Have I been a good parent?” Sometimes the epiphany focuses upon the parent’s own career trajectory: “I never had the job I wanted…why?” Until these threads are followed, named, given over to the muse of therapeutic conversation, the anxiety skulks, sometimes for years. It crops up in arguments with the adult child or with the partner. Launching is made more difficult by a parent’s own ambivalence about his own life. When you expect your child to launch, you can expect your own internal voice to whine and growl. The litany of “should haves…” and “could haves…” can trail into nighttime insomnia and fitful rest, into depression and anxiety.
A quick return to Winnicott and attachment theory offers perspective. In the 1950s Winnicott described “the good environment for the infant,”[10] the home in which “a mother naturally allows the full course of various experiences…She hates to break into such experiences as feeding or sleeping or defaecating.” According to Winnicott, the child has a “whole experience” characterized by developing her own agency. In the course of launching, the parent in the “good environment” is the one who allows the kids to be frustrated and angry with them and sometimes to even stomp off into the sunset for a while. Borrowing from Winnicott’s theories on attachment and differentiation, we can hope that the launching young adult enjoys the “whole experience,” the trajectory of cause and effect, of locus of control, of skills, and willfulness. This experience often comes with maelstrom and blunders. How can parents tolerate this jagged launching? Because they know that they did the best they could during those years of raising kids, using the resources and the skills that they had at the time. They offered to the child, not a sterile place of manicured perfection, but a good environment, a place to learn self-efficacy, albeit through much trial and error.
When I offer this thread of logic to a parent in my office, I am often met with the raised eyebrow of skepticism. “But I worked too much during his elementary school years…”. “But my temper and impatience…”. The guilt and shame often have haunted a father for years. I say again to the cringing parent, “You did the best you could during those years of raising children, using the resources and the skills that you had at the time.” Yes, the haunted parent could have done better, talked more to the child, worked on her own anger, spent less time in the office. Yes, some situations call for repair work and sometimes years of reconciliation. Still, even in the most dysfunctional of situations, I have yet to meet the parent who planned to alienate her child, to binge drink on weekends, or to season the family life with bouts of anger and depression. If the parent will follow my lead, we are able to see that indeed the dysfunctional patterns came from somewhere understandable. Often the parent’s own launching was fraught with anxiety and ambivalence. Their own childhood was one of enmeshment, an environment of confusion. Most mothers and fathers I know carry a bit of the chaos into their own parenting. Many work to unpack those bags, often not until the launching years of their own children.
In these transitional years of parenthood, in the launching of children, redemption can be found. It comes when a good-enough parent is willing to stare down the anxiety, to pull up from within herself the courage to look at a series of disappointing actions and reactions and to remember gently that life was complicated. Navigating one’s own journey, and then watching the adult child pull out of the dock is made smoother only with the radical acceptance of one’s own shenanigans. Who among us has not stomped away, spoken in anger, or sulked in a corner? The parent of the launching adult does well to be this honest with self. Not for the purpose of self-flagellating in a sea of shame. But for the simple realization that beauty is inherent in broken people. The newborn’s apparent perfection is no more an illusion than the weary parent’s flaws. Our children come from a gene-pool of saints and sinners, in fact each one in our family line is a microcosm of this dialectic. Launching a child means looking at self with gentle eyes. Launching means holding lightly the last memory you had of your bitter offspring and still trusting in a future season of reconnected lives. This time as two self-differentiated adults. Launching a child means trusting that the next conversation might very well be filled with humility, apology, forgiveness, and renewed relationship.
Bibliography
Bowen, Murray, “The 1959 Family as a Unit of Study and Treatment Workshop,” in The Origins of Family Psychotherapy: The NIMH Family Study Project. Edited by J Butler., Plymouth, 119-120. UK: Jason Aronsen, 2013.
McConville, Mark, Failure to Launch: why Your Twentysomething Hasn’t grow Up…and What to Do About It, 49-50. New York: G.P Putnum Sons, 2020.
Murkhoff, Heidi, What To Expect When You’re Expecting. New York: Workman Publishing Company, 1984.
Murkhoff, Heidi, What to Expect, “What to Expect - The Most Trusted Pregnancy & Parenting Brand,” n.d., https://www.whattoexpect.com.
National Center for Education Statistics. “Public High School Graduates, by Region, State, and Jurisdiction: Selected Years, 1980-81 through 2026-27,” https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_219.20.asp.
Winnicott,Donald W., “Maternal Preoccupation.” In Through Paediactrics to Psychoanalysis: Collected Papers, 300-305. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Winnicott, Donald W., “The Observation of Infants in a Set Situation.” In Through Paediactrics to Psychoanalysis: Collected Papers, 67. New York: Routledge,. 2018.
[1] Donald W. Winnicott, “Maternal Preoccupation,” in Through Paediactrics to Psychoanalysis: Collected Papers. (NY, NY: Routledge, 2018), 300-305.
[2] Heidi Murkhoff, What to Expect When You’re Expecting. (New York: Workman Publishing Company, 1984).
[3] Heidi Murkoff, “What to Expect - The Most Trusted Pregnancy & Parenting Brand,” https://www.whattoexpect.com.
[4] In this clinical section, all identifying details and names have been changed or omitted.
[5] iDanVidz. “Howard’s Mother // Mrs. Wolowitz | All Scenes - Season 1-4 | HD.” YouTube, May 21, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EBN0xlUGOg.
[6] Murray Bowen, “The 1959 Family as a Unit of Study and Treatment Workshop,” In The Origins of Family Psychotherapy: The NIMH family Study Project. ed. J Butler., (Plymouth, UK: Jason Aronsen, 2013), 119- 120.
[7] “Public High School Graduates, by Region, State, and Jurisdiction: Selected Years, 1980-81 through 2026-27,” n.d. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_219.20.asp.
[8] Mark McConville, Failure to Launch: Why Your Twentysomething Hasn’t Grown Up…and What to Do About It. (NY, NY: G.P Putnum’s Sons, 2020), 49-50.
[9] Mark McConville, Failure to Launch, 49.
[10] Donald W. Winnicott, “The Observation of Infants in a Set Situation.” in Through Paediactrics to Psychoanalysis: Collected Papers. (NY, NY: Routledge,. 2018), 67.