By Lisa S. Tarno

I have been feverishly devouring books and wisdom and insight on this season of my life: a life of quiet after the grown kids have left the nest. I briefly touched on it in my other blog entitled, “Relinquishing Our Roles” from an entry in July 2026. It was helpful to discover that there’s a name to this season for some of us called transitional grief. I had never heard that before but it made sense and gave more clarity for what some of us feel.

For me it comes on the heels of grieving my mother who passed just under a year ago. It’s a double whammy. I’m not writing to fixate on all that, just acknowledging the facts that the matriarch I once knew is no more and the role has shifted now to me and what does that mean? And then I read this, “The quiet house isn’t a vacuum. It’s a neurological incubator. Your bandwidth is redirecting toward longterm wisdom. You are building the matriarch!”~Family Heart Project on IG

That piqued my interest so I read more. I learned that for thirty years as a mom, my internal GPS relied on my kids’ coordinates- scanning where they were; are they okay? Once they left it was like my brain was left searching for “file not found”. This made complete sense to me. The question arose, “Why is this built into moms?” Their answer was, “Because grief is the literal chemical engineer of neuroplasticity. It’s the hammer your brain uses to force itself to learn a new reality.” ~ Family Heart Project on IG

It’s quite the shift to accept the reality that midlife grief really isn’t a failure to let go, but rather it’s some sort of physical brain upgrade according to my reading. That’s a good way to look at it rather than feeling pathetic and purposeless in this stage. I have had to come to accept that sorrow and joy can occupy the same head space free of rent. The two can be true. It is called cognitive dissonance where we scratch our heads at the wonder of conflicting or contradictory things that are happening at the same time. I love that there is a term for this reality. 

I memorized a poem from a devotional called Streams in the Desert years ago:

“I walked a mile with Pleasure

She chattered all the way

And left me none the wiser

For all she had to say.

I walked a mile with Sorrow

And ne’re a word said she

But oh the things I learned from her

When Sorrow walked with me.”

I have wrestled with this concept of Sorrow and Joy being companions of our life’s journey. You see, I rather prefer just Joy. I’ve equated it to a good chocolate chip cookie: The secret is adding just enough salt to make the sweetness perfect! Salt and sugar: Sorrow and Joy. 

But even songwriter Amy Grant recently said in an interview:

“Life is everything all at once… Life is the rhythm of the push and the pull. Our heartbeats never stop: It’s the squeeze and the release, the squeeze and the release. There are hard times: There is resolution. There is tension: There is the resolve. This is the rhythm of life.”

I’ve known throughout my life that just like the poem cited above says, we learn more, grow more and evolve from the harder things in life more than with just pleasant things. If we only had good things happen or forever remained in our comfort zones, we’d be too soft and not resilient to the harsh realities of life. The sheer force of gravity shows this physical reality on our bones in comparison, from NASA research, with those who have been weightless in space for a period of time. Hard things in life strengthen us. 

So with motherhood, there’s the release of a multi-year assignment of mothering babies to toddlers; toddlers to pre-schoolers; pre-schoolers to school age; school age to teenagers; teenagers to young adults. Little by little as we are training, disciplining, coaching and mentoring our kids we send them off to the world of adulthood hopefully with landing at friendship with them at this stage. The role of the matriarch is forming in us upon the release, especially when the news of grandbabies is forthcoming!

I loved reading this from the Family Heart Project, “We’re not losing our minds! Our bodies and brains are going through a necessary upgrade in midlife so we can fulfill our new role as keeper of the family heart! Grief is part of that upgrade.” WOW! That really blessed me. Grieving serves a purpose. It’s to remember what or who was loved deeply as much as it is a necessary pivot to a new direction that still has meaning if we have breath in our lungs. It’s all how we look at it.