|
TNMom - I feel your pain! Our youngest is a soph in college and I am still trying to figure out what to do with this "new" life of mine. Someone once asked if I was worried that my kids wouldn't be okay without us. Nothing could be further from the truth. We just SO enjoyed the 22 years we were together as a family unit that we have had some trouble adjusting to them being gone. H asks every day, "Have you heard from the girls?" And, after we've gone to bed, lying in the dark, he often says, "Remember when we had girls?" Tears my heart out every time. I thought that the transition was particularily difficult because I was a stay-at-home mom, but my husband is a professional who works 12 hour days every day and he feels the loss as much as I do.
I was a HUGE volunteer in our girls' schools throughout their education, so I hadn't really planned to do anything school oriented for awhile, but last year a couple of friends said, "You really should be involved in the YouthFriends program". It is a program that matches an adult in the community with a student who has life difficulties in one area or another. The first student they matched me with was in the middle school when we started and then I moved to the high school with him when he started there. You get together with them just an hour a week, during lunch or after school, etc. and just talk. One unexpected bonus was just randomly bumping into all the people I had known when my children attended those schools. Now I am paired with a younger girl who is a student at the elementary school my girls attended - getting to see people again I haven't seen very often in the 10 years since my kids left the school. So, maybe looking into some sort of volunteering at the high school would help keep that connection.
|