Fun without Dick and Jane: A Guide to Your Delightfully Empty Nest by Christie Mellor

Author:Christie Mellor [Mellor, Christie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2012-05-10T18:30:00+00:00

IN CASE YOU WEREN’T KIDDING

AND YOU REALLY DON’T HAVE ANY FRIENDS

It happens! It happens to a lot of people, I bet. You were really busy raising kids, maybe working a thousand hours a week, and then the kids left for college, and you started thinking about retiring, and you looked around and wondered, “Hey! Where is everybody?” Maybe you had a really high-powered job on top of being a mom, and you figured you were doing something pretty important, and your friends would be there when you finished making a bazillion bucks. But while you were really busy making a bazillion bucks and too busy to do stuff with your friends, those friends of yours had to continue living their lives, so they found other friends who enjoyed doing stuff with them. I know it’s kind of awkward seeing them now, years later, but it happens.

Maybe you got divorced, and didn’t realize that your ex-spouse was the one with all the friends when you were a couple. And you were busy getting your kids launched and out of the house, and now they’re finally gone, but so are all those people you used to hang out with. It happens!

Friends are good to have around. But who do you spend the most time with? If you’re married, it could be that you spend most of your time with your spouse, but if you’re a divorced or a single parent, it might be that you spend most of the time with yourself. And you know, now that the kids are gone? Now might be the perfect time to spend some time figuring out who you are, and what you really want, and who it is you really want to be with (if you’re in search of a partner) or if you want to be with anyone at all. If you’ve never spent much time on self-reflection, now might be a great time to delve a little deeper into your own issues. Life is really too short to not at least try to figure out some of this stuff, right? Like why we keep repeating the same patterns or reacting the same way to the same problems that keep cropping up, just because that’s how we’ve always reacted to those problems. You could talk to a therapist or psychologist. You could go to a Zen retreat or learn meditation, or look into the various self-actualization programs out there.

Sure, some look at this sort of thing as so much navel-gazing, but I think the more we learn about ourselves, the better humans we’ll ultimately be. Maybe you’ll end up liking yourself a whole lot more. And becoming a more thoughtful, self-aware person might just inadvertently attract more friends than you ever thought you’d have.

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