It’s Time for a New Chapter

By Donna Marie Marino, LMFT

I have lived in my home for sixteen years.

It is the longest I have ever lived in one house, and when I look around it now, I can see entire seasons of my life in the rooms.

This is the house where I raised my children. It saw all three of us through college and graduate school. It held us through career changes, surgeries, celebrations, hard seasons, graduations, launching a business, children moving away, a wedding and all of the ordinary Tuesdays in between.

For years, I have wondered when it would be time to leave.

When Lauren first went to college, I thought about downsizing.

Then H.L. left for college, and I thought about it again.

When they graduated, when H.L. moved across the country, when Lauren built more and more of her own adult life, I would look around and wonder whether this was the moment.

Every time, the answer was the same.

Not yet.

Until recently.

This time, something felt different.

I looked around the house that has taken such good care of us and realized, very simply:

It’s time for a new chapter.

When the Life You Built Begins to Change

August has always felt like a month of transition to me.

Summer is still here, but you can feel things beginning to shift. Children are heading back to school. College students are packing up bedrooms. Families are changing routines. Calendars suddenly look different.

Some transitions arrive with great fanfare.

Others happen so gradually that you barely recognize them until you look around one day and realize your life doesn’t look the way it used to.

My children are adults now.

They have homes and lives of their own. Lauren is married, and H.L. lives across the country. They will always come home, but their relationship to home has changed.

My kids visit now rather than live in our home - the home we built, from the ground up, together.  They are now visitors. 

That sentence still catches me a little.  I still see them, standing on the humongous pile of dirt that encompassed the entire front yard, when the builder dug out the foundation of this house in spring of 2016 - Lauren was 12; H.L. was 9.  The three of us literally watched this house become our home.  It went from a hole in the ground to the Christmas day Harry Potter movie marathons and all the homecomings, proms and track meet carb dinners before state championships in between.   

Recently, I changed out the original kitchen speckled granite to new, simplified and updated quartz countertops.  I literally cried as the granite was dismantled and I wondered to myself, “How many lasagna dinners and Christmas Eve traditions took place here?  How many nights did I listen to Lauren bake her night away to calm her always active mind and spirit or H.L. baking beignets for French class?  Friends, family, my father cooking me Sunday sauce while I recovered from surgery many years ago.  So many meals, deep talks, laughter, tears and joyful moments - so many seasons.  

For 20+ years, motherhood was tied to the physical work of creating a home. Pancakes on Sunday morning. Groceries in the refrigerator. Getting everyone where they needed to go. Knowing who would be home for dinner. Making sure there was a safe place at the end of the day where everyone could land.

Then, slowly, your children begin creating those places for themselves.

That is exactly what we raise them to do. It’s how it’s supposed to be 

And yet, it can still hurt a little when they do it.

Motherhood Is a Constant Practice of Letting Go

I’ve written before that motherhood is, in many ways, a continuous process of letting go.

The cord is cut.

You stop nursing.

They take their first steps away from you.

They get on the school bus.

They drive away alone for the first time.

They leave for college.

Eventually, if all goes well, they build lives that don’t require you in quite the same way.

At every stage, there is pride mixed with something harder to name.

You want them to go.

You also want to hold onto them.

I think there is a stage of motherhood we don’t talk about nearly enough: the moment when your children are fully launched and you have to begin asking yourself what this next part of your life is going to look like.

I see women wrestling with this in my office all the time.

Sometimes their youngest is starting senior year and they can already feel the change coming. Sometimes the last child has left for college. Sometimes the children have been gone for years, but a marriage, retirement, career change, or move suddenly brings the question back to the surface.

Who am I in this chapter?

And perhaps just as importantly:

What do I want now?

Knowing When Something Is Complete

I think one of the hardest parts of transition is that we often believe we need a good reason to leave something behind.

The relationship has to be terrible.

The job has to become unbearable.

The house has to stop working.

The old version of our life somehow has to fail before we’re allowed to choose something different.

My house hasn’t failed me, at any level.  

Quite the opposite.

It has been a beautiful home.

It did exactly what we needed it to do.

And maybe that’s why letting go has taken me so long.

A chapter can have been good and still be complete.

We don’t have to diminish what something meant to us in order to move forward.

Sometimes gratitude and goodbye belong in the same sentence.

Different Kinds of New Chapters

I see this kind of transition every day in my own work with adults and couples. Sometimes the chapter changing is parenthood or an empty nest. Sometimes it’s a career, a marriage, aging, identity, grief, or simply reaching a point where the life you’ve been living no longer feels quite like the life you’re meant to keep living. 

Therapy can offer a place to slow down long enough to ask what you want to carry forward, what you’re ready to release, and what you might be ready to create next.

In Colleen’s work with people healing from narcissistic abuse, a new chapter can require relearning how to trust your own voice after spending a long time having your reality questioned or your needs diminished. Recovery can involve grieving what happened while also rediscovering interests, relationships, boundaries, and parts of yourself that may have gotten lost along the way. 

Colleen helps clients navigate that process of letting go and begin again without asking them to rush the healing that has to happen in between.

Christina sees transition through another lens in her work with children, teens, and young adults. A new school year, changing friendships, greater independence, identity development, and even shifts in technology and routine can feel much larger to a young nervous system than adults sometimes realize. 

Through counseling and art therapy, Christina gives young people different ways to express what is changing, especially when they don’t yet have all the words for it, while also helping parents better understand what their children may be experiencing.

Different chapters. Different circumstances.

But so often the questions underneath them sound remarkably similar.

What am I leaving behind?

Who am I becoming?

And how do I move forward without losing the parts of myself that still matter?

Making Room for What Comes Next

My next home will be different.

A little smaller.

A little easier to maintain.

And, if all goes according to plan, there might be water nearby and a dock.

I’m pretty excited about that part.

But one thing has been incredibly important to me throughout this process.

I don’t want to create a home that belongs only to me.

I want Lauren and H.L. and their partners to walk through the door and immediately feel that they’re home.

And someday, if I’m lucky enough to have grandchildren, I want them to know what it feels like to come to Nonna’s house.

I had that feeling with the only grandparent I had a relationship with, my paternal Grandma Susan.  I was the first born grand-child and she and I had a special bond as such.  Grandma Susan was absolutely “My person.”  I know what it feels like to have that Grandma love you so much that it guides you to become who you’ve become.  My children unfortunately, didn’t have that experience growing up. They didn’t have grandparents whose homes represented that warm, safe, reliable place many people picture when they think about visiting Grandma or Grandpa.

I want to create that.

I want there to be a dock they jump from, beds they know are theirs when they visit, family meals, laughter, traditions, and memories that haven’t happened yet.

Maybe that’s one of the gifts of a new chapter.

You aren’t erasing the story that came before.

You’re taking what mattered most from it and deciding how you want to carry it forward.

What Season Are You In?

That’s what August has me thinking about this year.

Our lives are constantly moving through seasons.

Children grow up.

Relationships change.

Careers evolve.

Bodies age.

Homes change.

Versions of ourselves that once fit perfectly begin to feel a little too small.

We can’t stop those transitions, and I’m not sure we would really want to.

But we can learn to meet them with curiosity instead of automatically clinging to what has been.

We can be grateful for what was.

We can grieve what is ending.

We can be excited about what is coming.

Sometimes all three happen at once.

As for me, I am incredibly grateful for the sixteen years this home gave my family.

And when the right family walks through the door, I hope they can feel some of what has lived here.

I hope they fill these rooms with their own Sunday mornings, school backpacks, celebrations, ordinary dinners, hard conversations, laughter, growing pains, and memories.

This house held our chapter beautifully. It still holds the antique plaque that used to belong to my Grandma Susan decades ago . . . “Bless this house, oh Lord we Pray.  Make it safe by night and day.”  

Now I think it’s ready to hold someone else’s.

And I’m ready to see what happens in mine.