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Welcome to the Catholic Sobriety Podcast, the go-to resource for women seeking to have a deeper understanding of the role alcohol plays in their lives. Women who are looking to drink less or not at all for any reason. I'm your host, Christy Walker. I'm a wife, mom, and a joy-filled Catholic. And I am the Catholic sobriety coach. And I'm so glad you're here. So I posted something yesterday on my Instagram, well, on all of my social media, about college drop-off. You know, like the empty room, not needing your kids' favorite snacks in the cart anymore, checking Life 360 approximately 700 times a day. And you know what? I had way more to say than would fit into that reel. So I wanted to do an episode about it. So here we are. Now, this is my second year doing college drop-off. And I honestly thought that I already knew what to expect, but I didn't. At least, not really. Last year, everything about drop-off was completely new. So, of course, it hit me very hard. This year, I figured that I was prepared for it. And mostly I was, except for the small stuff. Like, I don't know about you, but my kids go through sparkling water at an absolutely absurd rate. And I don't think I even clocked that as a thing last year. I think I was just so raw from the transition itself that the small stuff didn't have room to really hit me. This year it does. We still have two at home, same as last year, but somehow I'm just noticing that there's more sparkling water left in the fridge at the end of the day. And there's fewer dishes in the sink. I know these sound like small little things, but that's actually what got me. It wasn't necessarily those big, obvious moments. It was the dishes and the water. And I was also meal planning this week, and I do this thing where I think through who's gonna be home, who you know has outside commitment, and who actually eats this and who won't touch that. And I caught myself not having to think about my son that's away at school as I was making the menu. It's just one less person to plan around. And that was again unexpected, even though this is my second time doing this. It's such a small practical thing, but it still got me. And then there was another one too. He moved into a new apartment this year. So for weeks, we were planning and shopping and making sure that he had everything he needed. And that prepping, I didn't realize it at the time, but that was in its own way staying connected to him. And then he moved in and we took him grocery shopping, and then it was done. We weren't prepping for anything anymore. And that ending turned out to be its own little twinge of loss or grief that I wasn't expecting either. So here's something interesting. Saying goodbye this year was actually easier than last year. Like we gathered together, we prayed as a family before he set off in his car to go to his new apartment. He was able to go without me being an absolutely crying mess while he was leaving or hours afterward, which last year that was totally me. But this year I held it together. But then we got in the car for that six and a half hour drive home, and that's when it hit. Normally on that drive, I'm pretty productive, or let's be honest, sometimes I'm napping, but I do try to get work done. I'll listen to an audiobook, and I use that time. But this time I just junk scrolled, not scrolling with any purpose, not even really watching anything at all, just scrolling the whole way home. So I want to talk about first why week two might hit a little harder for you than week one, uh, especially for those moms who are in their first year, because I think it's something that might catch you off guard. Week one, you're running on adrenaline or you're completely wiped out emotionally. You know, you might have your friends that are like, hey, mama, how are you doing with your child at school? Your, you know, your sister might call to check-in on you. You're busy just getting the rest of the house back into a rhythm. And then, you know, there's also the other kids that are going back to school. And then week two comes and that adrenaline rush is gone, the check-ins slow down, and the house just starts to quiet. And it kind of feels like it's always going to be this way. Even when you have other kids at home, there's just a quietness that happens when one of your people is out of the house. And that's often when the grief settles in. It's not necessarily on drop-off day, although, again, it was big for me last year. If you're in your second week and it actually feels heavier than it did the first week, I want you to know that that doesn't mean that something's wrong with you and you're always going to be sad or, you know, feeling this low level of grief and not know what to do with it. It just means that you're further into the reality of it, and that's completely normal. The other thing I want to say is you don't need anyone's permission to feel this way. It's like with grief. It's actually the same thing with other types of grief. It's on your own timeline. Like nobody can say, oh, just snap out of it. And I also want to say this you can be proud that your child is growing up exactly as they should be, and you can be genuinely happy for them. And you can also be sad at the same time. Those two things are not in competition. And nobody, including the voice in your own head, gets up to tell you what you can and can't feel. So here's what I realized that I was actually doing. I was buffering when I was junk scrolling on the way home. I wasn't feeling the feeling, I was filling space where the feeling was supposed to go. And I knew it while I was doing it. I actually said to myself in that moment, I am feeling this emptiness, and I'm trying to fill it with something that's not going to fill it. And when we got home, it was even more pronounced for me. My son's door was left partially open, and I didn't even want to open it. But my husband ended up doing it, and I had to face his empty room. And that night I kept scrolling. And I completely knew what I was doing, and I just let myself do it anyway. I also let myself feel it. I didn't shame myself for buffering that night. I just noticed it. I named it and I knew that going forward, that wasn't going to be my normal. That wasn't going to be a pattern that I was going to keep repeating. And the next day, it wasn't. When I woke up the next morning, I decided I was just going to face it head on. I sat down and I journaled. Just whatever was in there, I just needed it to come out. And when I journal, I'm actually talking to the Lord while I do it. I call it praying with my pen. And that's where the feeling actually happened. Right there on those pages. I was writing furiously and fast. And it was just so healing for me. And once I got that all out, I just felt so much better. So this is what I want you to know. Whether your version of this is wine or scrolling or busyness or food, wanting to numb something and wanting relief from a feeling are not always the same instinct. And telling them apart can be really difficult. That night I wasn't craving scrolling on my phone. I was craving relief from an emptiness that I hadn't fully let myself feel. The scrolling I knew very well that it was never going to touch that. And that nothing outside of actually feeling it was going to. The wine is never going to fill the space where your son or daughter used to sit at the table. It was only really going to help you stop noticing that space for a little while. So what do you do? What do you do instead? Well, I'm not going to hand you a call a friend, go for a walk, call it a day type of list. Here's what's actually worked for me last year and this year and for the women I coach through this season. One of the things I love to do is to text my son something funny, but not every day. Not so much that it becomes me checking in on him instead of letting him go. But every once in a while, I'll send him a reel or a meme or something that reminds him that I'm thinking of him. And what that does when you do that is it gives you a small real point of contact that isn't a phone call. And it just lets them respond when they have time. The other thing is to build in one standing low pressure connection point. For my son and I last year, it was a Friday walk. So he usually only had one early class on Fridays. So I would walk the dog and call him at the same time. I would always text him in the morning and say, Hey, I'm going to be taking Cooper for a walk between this time and this time. Are you available for a walk in a chat? And most of the time it was a yes. Sometimes it was a no. And that was okay. I gave him the option, never felt made him feel guilty for not being able to talk to me. If he had other plans, wanted to do stuff with friends. It was something that was already built into a habit that I was already doing. So for him, it didn't feel like a big check-in. I don't think it felt more like, hey, mom's walking and she's bored and she likes to chit-chat when she's walking. Because honestly, it makes the walk go faster. I love walking and talking. That's like the only time I ever talk on the phone is when I'm walking. But anyway, so we that's something that we built in last year. The other thing is we had like one standing family connection. On Sundays for us, we would FaceTime. It was usually just my husband and I, sometimes his brothers, if they were around. But it's just we all just kind of showed up for a little while, touched base uh on FaceTime, got to see each other. And it was great to have that check-in. And again, if he was busy and couldn't do it, we were understanding of it and didn't try to make him feel bad or anything for not being able to do it. One of my favorite things to do is to send care packages. And this helps because if I'm out shopping and I happen to see like one of his favorite snacks or something I think he'd like, I can just pick it up and then I have a box going and I can throw it in that box. And then when it gets to a point where, you know, I feel like there's enough in it and I'm ready to send it, then I'll send it to him. Or like what happens is he will have forgotten a piece of clothing or shoes or something, and he'll say, Hey mom, can you send XYZ? This year it was his scooter charger, his electric scooter charger. And so I'm like, sure. So I just threw in some candy that I had already collected for him with his scooter charger and sent it off to him. So my son has not even completed his first week of school and he's already gotten his first little mini care package. But it's it helps because then I feel like I'm still, you know, doing stuff for him and he always loves getting them. And it doesn't have to be stuff that's too expensive. Like one thing that he loves this time of year is candy corn. So I'll pick some candy corn up, put it in the box, and then when I send it, then he'll be really excited that he has that candy corn along with whatever else I find for him. So it's something that just says, like, I saw this and I thought of you. And it provides them with just a sense of comfort from home as well. The other thing is explore doing something new, whether that's a hobby or listening to audiobooks, which is one of my favorite things, or spending more time with the people that you have in your house, like doing some other things. Honestly, I'm still kind of figuring this out. Like the other day, I was thinking, I'd really like to take up needlepoint. And then I could do needlepoint while my son and my husband are watching baseball or whatever. Well, baseball season's almost over, but you know what I mean? Because then I could be downstairs with them. I don't know. It's it's one of those things that I haven't fully solved for, but I think it's kind of a work in progress, especially as you know, my other children leave the nest as well. It's just going to be getting quieter and quieter. And pretty soon, before we know it, it will just be my husband and I, which, you know, that will be a new normal for us. So the point is to just kind of like slowly widen your world a little bit on purpose and start trying these new things. Now, I will say, none of these things is going to make you miss them less. It's not going to make it go away. And that's not the goal. You're missing them because you love them and you will always love them. So you're always going to miss them. But the goal is that you have somewhere to put that love and attention that used to go into daily life with them. So it doesn't have to be a default glass of wine at the end of the day, it can be something else. One other thing I'll just throw out there, it just came popped into my mind. I didn't have it in my notes, is you can, if you're really struggling and your those emotions have just like overcome you, just hop into a warm shower and just that will reset your nervous system. It will give you some time alone. And if you want to cry, cry in the shower and just let those emotions go. It's not bad to feel those emotions. It's okay and they need to go somewhere. And drinking alcohol or junk scrolling or whatever isn't going to completely get rid of them. It's just going to be postponing them until you can finally address them. So if you're in this season, whether it's your first drop-off or you're like me and it's your second or maybe your third or fourth, I think the goal is actually just to let yourself miss them without needing something to numb it. And here's why that's important, just beyond the line. Every time you reach for something to make those hard feelings disappear faster than they're supposed to, you are practicing a version of yourself who can't sit still inside her own life. And every time you let that feeling actually move through you, even when it's uncomfortable, even in the car, at the kitchen sink, in the shower, you're practicing the version of yourself who knows that she doesn't have to escape what's true in order to get through it. That's identity work. That's you becoming a little more each time the woman that God actually created you to be instead of a woman who just copes her way through it. That takes practice. That doesn't happen overnight. It's not instinct, especially if wine has been your go-to way of handling hard feelings for a while. And that's exactly what my sacred sobriety Kickstart walks you through. It's free, it's five videos at your own pace to start building that muscle of noticing what you're actually feeling before you reach for something to make it go away. And if you want to be around other women walking through this season and others, I have so many wonderful ladies in the Sacred Sobriety lab right now navigating many different types of transitions. So you don't have to figure it out alone. Links to both are in the show notes, along with that reel from yesterday that I told you about, if you want to see where this conversation started. So before we go, I want to leave you with something you can actually pray over your child tonight, in the car, wherever you are, when this hits, will you pray with me? In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, thank you for the gift of my child. Thank you for every year that you let me raise them and for the person you are forming them into now, even in the ways I can't see up close anymore. I miss them, Lord, and I don't want to rush past that missing or bury it under something that only makes it quiet for a minute. Teach me to feel this the way you made me to feel it, without shame, without needing to escape it. Watch over them tonight, surround them with people who see who they really are, protect their heart, their mind, their choices, and give me the grace to trust that they are yours before they are mine, that you love them even better than I do, and you are not done writing their story. Help me let go of what I can't control and hold tightly to what I can, my own peace, my own presence, my own witness to them of what it looks like to walk with you. Amen. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. So here's what's actually got me thinking about this right now. I've got several clients doing their first drop-off this year. First time watching their kid leave, first time sitting with this specific kind of quiet in the house, and they're feeling it to their core. The glass of wine, the buffering, the scrolling, they think it means that something went wrong. Like all the work that they've done up to this point just stopped working. This is not a setback. This is just grief showing up somewhere where we didn't expect it to show up. So next time on the podcast, I'm going to talk about exactly that. What it means when you feel like your tools aren't working anymore, and why that is not the same thing as failing. I'll talk to you again soon. Well, that does it for this episode of the Catholic Sobriety Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I would invite you to share it with a friend who might also get value from it as well. And make sure you subscribe so you don't miss a thing. I am the Catholic sobriety coach, and if you would like to learn how to work with me or learn more about the coaching that I offer, visit my website, the Catholic Sobriety.