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Boundaries With Adult Children Without Losing the Relationship · After the Rush Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I am standing in my kitchen with my phone in hand and I have written four versions
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: of one text message to one of my sons and deleted it three times.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because the honest version felt like it might cost me the thing I've spent 30 years building.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Not a fight, a quieter kind of loss and a worse one.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: The kind of distance you don't notice happening until you're already living inside it.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Wondering when exactly the phone calls got shorter.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's what this episode is about.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Not how to set a boundary.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: What to do with the fear that a boundary might cost you
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: the relationship it's supposed to protect.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Those are two different problems,
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: and almost everything that gets called boundary advice only ever addresses
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: the first one.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the shape of the reflex,
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: because I think naming the shape is more useful than narrating the fight.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: For 20 some years, being needed was the job.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody's stomach hurt at two in the morning,
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: and you were the one who knew what that particular cry meant.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: The one who could tell fever from teething, from the general theater of being four years old.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody needed a ride,
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: a signature, a hand to hold through a hallway that smelled like a hospital.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: You built an entire identity out of being the answer to whatever the question turned out to be.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a burden most days.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was some of the best work I've ever done.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I say that as a woman who has also run departments and written grants
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: and negotiated actual contracts.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: But the muscle that says yes without checking first,
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: that muscle doesn't know the job has changed.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody sends a memo.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: It just keeps firing on the old signal long after the actual need
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: behind it has quietly become a different one.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: So a grown man in his 30s asks his mother for an ordinary favor.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: One she'd have said yes to without a second thought for the last two decades.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the yes is halfway out of her mouth before the rest of her catches up and asks
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: a question no one ever taught her to ask.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Did I actually have room for this?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Not room in the calendar.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: I can usually find room in the calendar.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Room in the self.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's a harder inventory.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the one most of us were never trained to take.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: I want to say plainly that I don't think this reflex is a flaw in anyone's character.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's the residue of doing the job well for a very long time.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: The job simply isn't the same job anymore.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: And updating the muscle takes longer than updating the calendar does.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: I noticed my own version of it on an ordinary Wednesday.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing dramatic about the day itself.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: My son called about something small,
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: and I heard myself agreeing before he'd even finished the sentence,
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: the way you'd catch a glass falling off a counter without thinking about it first.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: It was only afterward,
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: standing there with the agreement already given,
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: That I asked myself whether I'd actually wanted to say yes,
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: or whether I'd just been fast.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Fast isn't the same thing as willing.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: It took me most of my adult life to learn the difference between the two,
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: and I'm still relearning it most weeks.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: I have a friend whose daughter calls her most days needing a decision made for her.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Which apartment to take.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Whether to confront a difficult co-worker.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: What to make for a dinner party for people the daughter has never met before
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: and is already anxious about impressing.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: My friend answers every single time,
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: and she has told me more than once that she loves being needed this much,
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: that it makes her feel essential in a way retirement had otherwise taken away
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: from her.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: I understand the appeal of that completely.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: I have felt it myself standing in the same kitchen.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the part she doesn't say out loud, though I think she knows it.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Her daughter is 34 years old and has never once had to sit with
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: an unmade decision long enough to find out what she actually thinks about anything.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Every time my friend answers the phone with a decision already assembled
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: and gift wrapped,
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: she's doing her daughter a kindness in the moment and a disservice across
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: the decade.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: The daughter isn't learning to trust her own judgment
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: because she's never been required to use it without her mother standing right there
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: behind her.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: I know another woman, a boundary run in the opposite direction.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Who went cold on her son the year he turned 40.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: She decided somewhere in a book or a seminar that independence meant withdrawal.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: That the loving thing was to stop being available to all so he'd finally be forced
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: to stand on his own two feet.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't race to the challenge the way the book had promised.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: He just stopped calling as often.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then he stopped calling much at all.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Two years later,
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: she told me she'd overcorrected so hard she'd broken the very thing she was trying
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: to protect,
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: and she didn't know how to walk it back without it looking to either of them,
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: like she'd lost an argument with herself in front of an audience.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: I tell you both of these stories because the internet mostly sells you
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: the second one dressed up as strength.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: All steely independence and healthy detachment, and I don't think either extreme is the design.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Answering everything isn't love.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Answering nothing isn't independence.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Both of them are apparent solving their own discomfort and calling it a nobler word.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: What I notice watching both women from a small distance is
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: that neither one ever actually asked her adult child what they needed.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Both decided on their own,
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: in private,
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: what love was supposed to look like in this decade,
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: and then delivered it whether it fit or not.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's the part I keep coming back to.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: The boundary itself was never really the variable.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Whether anyone ever asked a real question and waited for a real answer was.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be careful here because family research on this is genuinely mixed
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: and I am not a family therapist.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: What I can tell you in general and hedged terms is that the research
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: on adult children and their parents tends to find something specific
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: and worth sitting with.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Relationships where the parent can tolerate being told no,
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: where a boundary doesn't trigger a crisis on either side,
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: tend to be reported by both generations as closer over time than relationships where
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: the parents remain endlessly and unconditionally available.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Some of that work looks at what family researchers called differentiation.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: How much a person can stay connected to family while still holding
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: a separate opinion under pressure?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: None of it agrees on exact numbers, and I'm not going to hand you one I can't stand behind.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's a pattern in the literature, not a verdict on your particular family.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to say plainly that everything I'm telling you here comes
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: from my own kitchen table and my own two sons,
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: not a clinical prescription for yours.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Your family has its own history and its own math, and only you actually know it.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: What if what I'm describing doesn't fit your situation?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Trust your own read over mine.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'd rather you leave this episode with a question you're still working out than
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: a rule you've adopted because I said it with confidence.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's a version of this conversation that tells you
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: the whole relationship needs reinventing now that the kids are grown.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: That you have to tear down 30 years of trust and start over
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: as strangers learning each other from scratch.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Careful and clinical.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like two people meeting for the first time at a mediation table.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't believe that.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to push against it directly.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because it isn't what's actually required.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it isn't what's actually happening in my own house either.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to reinvent a relationship that's already has three decades
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: of real trust sitting inside it.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: You need to design new rules onto a foundation that was never the problem.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: The love was never the issue.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: The issue is that the rules were written when one of you is eight years old
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: and neither of you has sat down since to write the new ones on purpose.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: So you're both still operating off a contract that expired a long time ago
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: without either of you noticing the date on it.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Design asks what already works here and how do we build the next version around it?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Reinvention asks you to burn the house down And camp in the yard while you figure it out.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not interested in the second one,
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: and I don't think you are either,
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: or you wouldn't still be this afraid of losing what you already have.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: So here's what design actually looks like in practice at my own kitchen table.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: First, the boundary gets said once, plainly, without an essay attached to it.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is the hardest thing for me to learn because my instinct,
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: every single time, is to explain myself into safety.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: I want to give the reasons,
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: the caveats,
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: the reassurance that I still love him just as much,
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: all of it wrapped around the actual sentence like packing material,
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: as if the no itself is too fragile to survive being said directly.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: I can't do that this time.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Is a complete sentence,
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: and it doesn't need three more sentences trailing behind it to apologize.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: The paragraph justification is usually follows isn't protecting the relationships.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Nine times out of ten,
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: it's protecting me from sitting in the discomfort of having said the plain thing.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Second, the guilt that shows up afterward belongs to you,
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: and it isn't a signal that you did something wrong.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: I feel guilty almost every time I say no to one of my sons,
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: and I've had to learn,
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: slowly and with some resistance, that the guilt is just the old muscle firing.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: The identity that spent two decades being needed,
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: noticing it isn't being used the same way anymore.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: It is not information about whether the boundary was fair.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Those are two entirely different signals coming from two entirely different places.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I spent a long time reading one as if it were the other,
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: which is how a reasonable boundary ends up feeling like a crime.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: The third piece,
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: the one I think almost nobody says honestly,
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: is that the relationship gets to survive a boundary that lands badly.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: If you say the honest thing and there's a cold week afterward,
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: a shorter phone call,
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: a flicker of hurt in his voice you can hear even through the phone,
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: that isn't proof the boundary was a mistake.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's simply what it costs sometimes to say something true to another adult
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: who loves you and is hoping for a different answer.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: The relationship can survive a badly landed boundary and come back around anyway.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: On its own,
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: without you rushing to smooth it over,
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: it's a stronger relationship than the one that was never once allowed to be tested.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: I finally sent the text.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Not the fourth version, actually.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: A fifth one,
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: shorter than any of the first four that said the true thing in one sentence and
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: then stopped.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: No paragraph of reassurance trailing after it.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: My phone sat quiet on the counter for about 20 minutes,
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: which felt considerably longer than the 20 minutes usually feels like.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: The kind of quiet where you find yourself checking the screen even
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: though you've had heard a buzz.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Then it did buzz.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's fair.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Talk this weekend?
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: The whole outcome.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Not a rupture.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Not a breakthrough conversation about our entire relationship.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Just an ordinary text back.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: And an ordinary Saturday call still sitting on the calendar exactly where it was before.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: I put the phone face down on the counter and went back to
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: the onions I had left chopped on the cutting board in the kitchen.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, went back to being in an ordinary kitchen on an ordinary night.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: If you found this episode useful, get the next one delivered straight to you.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: And if you know someone drifting in their own fourth text right now,
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: share a link, send it their way.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And until the next episode, stay well and enjoy the day.