Does widowhood mean moving back in with mum and dad?

For many of us we don’t even live in the same country as our parents, but we are very much wanting to be rescued.

Can you even return to the fold? Initially so many of us retreat emotionally, back to the last time we had big heart break, and that was as a teenager living at home. Only now we have kids of our own, a home that we run, a job, a lifestyle, schools, sports etc.

There were millions of us stuck in another country to our parents and family. Not able to access family , urban or otherwise.

So, when you are trying to find safety and certainty, in the early days, many widows will return home to mum and or dad, to get them to step in and help do the adulting, while we “figure out what’s next”. .

Differing family values

With that though comes the inner conversation that we don’t live by those house rules now, that the town they are in doesn’t meet our lifestyle and the future is bleak. But food will arrive on the table and if there is a medical emergency there are adults around to help. The kids will bounce back and make new friends (as though that is the primary concern of children who have just lost their whole construct of life), and we can catch up on finances and other stuff.

What if you don’t have that option, if they live in a small 2 bed flat and can’t take you?

What if their lifestyle, values, and beliefs are too different to yours.

A couple of key things to think about, and I’ll keep them lite as you are still under widows’ fog, is that: -

1-the kids and you need safety and certainty to allow as much grieving to happen naturally and to its fullness. Getting used to not having mum or dad around, being able to collapse in their own rooms, seeing something familiar everyday is a strong base for them to adjust to all the disconnections, taking place in their minds and heart. Yours too.

2- If the family you are moving back to is an integral part of your values and beliefs as a family, then that emotional safety is worth the change.

3- If the family is emotionally unavailable, full of tough love, shutting down emotions, pull yourself together masculine energy, the grieving process will be magnified by the trauma.

Psychologists worldwide agree that the success of your recovery and that of the kids, is dependant on your access to resourceful emotional processing, professional grief support, health family support and physical and financial safety.

Grieving can be ugly and messy

If the Covid pandemic taught me anything, it was that being locked away from family and friends, whilst incredibly lonely, also allowed me to avoid the pressure of recovering in other people’s way, with their time constraints and influences. The anger phase is REAL. You need more than a snickers to move through it and it is confronting on its own without adding another person to consider. It allowed me to provide love and compassion and space and time for my self and kids to release the tears, the screaming, the need to run away down the street, to sleep for 12 hours after 2 nights of not, without feeling like a burden, or out of control, or impolite. Of course, I knew that I needed functional support and recognised what my resources were around me.

Turns out sharing our healing, establishing boundaries, giving each other safe spaces and grieving language, nourishing food, and outlets, was integral. So, when I look back at whether I would have moved or not, I see clearly that wanting to be rescued to have someone take all the pain away, didn’t necessarily mean “move back home”. It meant doing the inner work to rescue myself so I could rescue the kids and teach them to rescue themselves.