Preparing Our Kids (and Ourselves) as They Leave the Nest, with Christina Geist

0:00Amy, let me tell you about a magical place that is so exactly designed to be enclosed space, year-round fun for the whole family, that I bet you already know what I'm going to say before I even say the name. Let's say it together on three. One, two, three. Great Wolf Lodge. You got it, Amy.

0:21Heidi Raykeil:My kids loved Great Wolf Lodge when we went. You probably already know that it has a huge indoor water park with a wave pool, Lazy River, a bunch of massive water slides. But then your pack can hit the other attractions because, wait, there's more. Great Wolf Lodge has adventure-packed attractions like MagiQuest, a live-action game kids can play throughout the lodge. Plus, the Northern Lights Arcade spent some quality time there. So your kid who loves the Lazy River and your kid who loves fantasy games will both have a great time. Great Wolf Lodge also offers great dining options and complimentary daily events like nightly dance parties.

0:56Heidi Raykeil:All under one roof. Unpack the car once and you're settled in to have fun. And with 22 lodges across the country, you're always a short drive away from adventure. We've both had such great times at Great Wolf Lodge. So bring your pack together at a lodge near you. Learn more at greatwolf.com and strengthen the pack. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Fresh Take. From what fresh hell? Laughing in the face of motherhood. This is Margaret. And this is Amy. Today, we are talking to our friend, Christina Geist. She is a writer, entrepreneur, and brand strategist. Christina is the author of the Buddy series of picture books from Random House, including the bestseller, Sorry Grownups, You Can't Go to School.

1:39Heidi Raykeil:Christina lives in New York with her husband, Willie Geist, who you may know from NBC's Sunday Today, and MS Now's Morning Joe and their two children. Today, we are going to talk about Christina's latest book, Before You Fly Away, Life Lessons from Home. Welcome, Christina. Thank you. It's so good to be back. Returning champion. We don't have a lot of returning champions. You've been with us before, but today we're going to talk about something entirely new. Right. The last time we were here, we weren't in this stage of life at all. And now we definitely are, which is having kids leave the nest.

2:15Heidi Raykeil:So just to level set, my final child is going to leave the nest for college in August. Margaret's first child is going to leave the nest for college about the same time. And Christina, tell us about you. Yeah. So my first child left the nest almost a year ago. So we are on the other side of that experience and we made it. She's doing great. But this book in particular kind of percolated for me her senior year in high school as I started to have these, I don't know what to call them, like maybe sort of little mini panic moments kind of like leading up to her leaving our home and moving on. And obviously she comes home for four weeks at a time.

3:00She'll be home for three months very soon. But still, you feel like you're on this threshold of, have I taught them everything? Have I said everything out loud that I hoped they would know, having been raised here in this place by us? And you sort of feel this kind of almost parental report card developing that senior year in high school. For me, that manifested itself in the middle of the night, jotting down these little lessons. What's the rulebook? If I were to write it, what would it say that I could capture? And then it occurred to me probably around February of her senior year in high school, maybe this is a little book that I could gift to her.

3:43And I could actually print this and hand it to her for graduation. And in the process of doing that, you realize you've self-published a book. Just to get to the point of having something in your hand, even just to give it as a gift to your own child, a couple more buttons are pushed these days in a great way for writers out there. And I self-published the book. So it's actually released almost a year ago now that you'll be hearing this episode. And then what happened is it struck a chord with other folks out there like me who were feeling this way. And a publisher called Andrews McNeil noticed and bought the book and they're re-releasing it now.

4:27So it's kind of getting this, I don't know, sort of legit publication off of something that was truly meant to kind of be a gift that I could give to my own kids. Because at the same time my daughter was getting prepared to go to college, my son was learning to drive. And so those two big life changes were happening at the same time. It resonates so much with me as I have my first going because I spend so much time with exactly those thoughts. And it's everything from like, do you know not to use the phone while you're driving to do you know what to do if you get like a weird feeling in space?

5:07And also, do you know that you have to get to the airport an hour before flight? It just it feels like I so relate to that feeling of what haven't you said yet? And it feels so immediate and so overwhelming. And also, it's so vast. Of course, I remember my freshman year of college. I went to the laundry room and I shoved all my things in the washer. And my roommate, who I think some of it was her stuff, said, what are you doing? You separate darks from light. You don't put everything at the same temperature. Completely new news to me. I had always done it that way at home, and I guess no one had walked by when I was doing it.

5:46And so was it very organic in terms of like, this is the thing I'm thinking of right now, or did you try to go through everything that might come up? I hear you. There's a piece of paper, first of all, in our laundry room here in our house that's like helpful tips from me that I printed and just put up by the laundry. Christina, I could have used that when I was in high school, clearly. Can we make that a PDF? Jeff giveaway. I'll actually see if I can find it. That's your next book is like laundry trips for Margaret. Yeah. So there are those practical things, right? Like how to do the laundry.

6:19And then there are these huge existential lessons, sort of like one of them for me was recklessness and regret go hand in hand. Yeah. And that for me kind of summed up all that I want you to think about on a Saturday night when you're heading out. Recklessness and regret go hand in hand. So that's major. And that covered so much in those few words. I tried when I got to the point of, okay, let me actually look at what this note looks like in my phone with 150 of these lessons. Let me call them down. Let me give them to her, to them. And let me express them in as concise a way that I possibly can.

7:03because in this world we live in, nobody wants a lecture. Nobody wants to be preached to, right? Especially your kids. And the more you talk, the less memorable it becomes. So I really wanted to distill the thought down, sort of direct and memorable as I could with each lesson. So that was kind of the editing process I put myself through. And then most of them are bigger level thoughts, like be nice to yourself is lesson one. There are 50 lessons in the book. It's a short read. It's not intended to be a novel by any means. It's more intended to be something you can kind of pick up, think about, maybe you'll talk about it.

7:46Maybe parents will add their own words of wisdom in the back. We have blank pages in the back. Such a smart idea. I love that. And it's so fun because I actually did hear from families that did that When I self-published the first volume, the first edition, I started to get these social media messages from people saying, we bought this. We all added notes. We made notes on the pages that felt truest to us. And the grandparents picked a page. And they kind of made it their own, which is a phrase my dad always says, like, make it your own. But people really did do that. And that was a beautiful thing to see.

8:21So some of it is specific. You know, costume parties are more fun. That's a pretty specific lesson. But I've learned that many times. Costume parties are 100 % more fun. And so there's fun stuff in there. And then there are these kind of bigger picture thoughts like respect people who are doing their job, no matter the job. That's a bigger thought that's more career focused or just kind of how you handle yourself in the world as opposed to what you're up to on Saturday night. They're both important though. Or separate your blacks from whites.

8:54Heidi Raykeil:That too. As I'm doing this now, preparing to do this for the third time, I'm noticing in myself something that I now know not to be true. Like this is one of those things like turning 40 or 50 or whatever that seems way scarier and harder when it's ahead of you than when it's behind you, which I'm saying in an attempt to be reassuring. But what I'm noticing in myself as I do this third time around is that there's an expiration date. Like, I need to think of everything I haven't told you, because if I don't tell it to you by midnight on August 18th, it will be too late, right? Yes. That is definitely not the case.

9:30Heidi Raykeil:The blind spots in our case were how to use an ATM card and how to check the monitors in an airport to know what gate your flight leaves from. And that if it leaves at 529, that doesn't mean you go to the gate at 528. eight. Like these are all lessons learned the hard way because maybe I never exactly mentioned it. But the blind spots are the point. Yeah. And the blind spots are how your kid grows. But this anxiety, I mean, it's interesting. Our kids are not worried that there's 50 things we haven't told them yet. Like they're pretty ready to go. Yeah. What part of this book did you write for yourself as much as for your daughter?

10:06Oh, equally. Right. It was as much a catharsis for me. It was as much for me, okay, I feel like I just need to hand this to you and it will make me feel like I've put it all down. And I also think as much as it was for her, and I'll share that I'm probably going to get emotional, but I did this as, you know, I'm a writer. So I express myself this way. It's natural for me when I'm working through something to sit down and to write it the same way I know both of you do. And for many people, that is not their normal kind of muscle that they use in that moment. But for me, it very much is. So that felt natural.

10:46And I was sort of doing this off to the side as a project. When we got to drop my daughter off at college the night before we're in the hotel, my husband made his own version of his 50 lessons that he had printed and folded. And he didn't get it in a bound book. But he handed that to her the night before she moved in and we sat in the hotel and we read his version together. And then this is going to just break me because I've never talked about this. At Christmas, she handed us her version. Wow. She wrote after I flew away and made it and gave it to us at Christmas. And it was the final gift on Christmas morning.

11:33And it just like totally melted me because she sat and reflected on it in her own way of how she felt back to us. And she did that after she had gotten to school and had been at school for a while and was looking then in her own kind of rear view mirror. So sorry. But that's the kind of household that we live in. We're communicators. Right. And so it was a really beautiful process that we all three put ourselves through to think about how do I want you to move through the world? How have I moved through the world? And what am I taking from you? And what am I giving back? So it ended up being this really, really beautiful experience for all three of us.

12:16I think with parents in general, what is happening this senior year of high school, this preparation, is that we're almost giving ourselves a transcript, right? If you think about your kid is finishing their educational career that they spent under your roof. So in a way, a lot of that is on you. You made the choices of where they were going to go to school. You were sitting there monitoring the homework. You were doing these parent-teacher conferences. You've been so hands-on, not just academically, but obviously in every element of their life up until this moment. And now it's not going to be about you anymore.

13:00You're not going to know if there's a test on Tuesday unless they share that with you. And you won't even see the grades unless they share them with you. So your time in this position of sort of like headmaster is coming to a real close And I feel like that's part of what is hard for parents to accept in that senior year is what does my transcript look like? Have I done the job that, oh, my gosh, I hope I would have done? And I think that's part of that impending, not doom, but that impending judgment of yourself. It's like it is a kind of a judgment day when they graduate from high school. Here's the final exam.

13:44Are they going to be a functional human now? Yeah. Yeah. And like, did I do it? And you don't ever get that transcript. It's never handed to you. So I think that is part of how we are all really feeling that senior year. It is as much about them leaving the nest as it is about you saying, okay, what's my GPA? And that judgment of yourself is I think what weighs us down a little bit in this time, in this senior year time. If that makes sense.

14:18Heidi Raykeil:It sure does. We're talking to Christina Geist. She is the author of Before You Fly Away, Life Lessons from Home, and we'll be right back. For some of us, tax season is one of the only times that we look at our finances fully. And once it's over, well, that was terrible. And it is completely understandable not to want to think about it for another whole year. But using Monarch and being intentional with your finances in an ongoing way helps you see where your money is going and how you can put your refund to best use. We are here to tell you, simplify your finances with Monarch. Monarch is the all-in-one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier.

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17:15Get 10 % off your first order site wide with code fresh at oseamalibu.com. That's 10 % Send off your first order with code FRESH at OSEAMALIBU.COM. Christina, one of the things that struck me is the idea of writing it down. One of the things that I think has become a theme on the podcast that I think about a lot is being really curious about your own life and being purposeful about defining your values, basically, that sometimes life gets so busy and we're like, we think in our head, my value is to have a happy, close family. That's my value. But then we find ourselves running to a million soccer practices and throwing lunches in the car and kind of living a life that maybe doesn't totally align with what we see as our value.

18:11Not that those two things, I'm just using an example, but like how easy it is for the stream of life to carry you along. And you don't remind yourself to check in of like, is this really what we want to be doing? Or are we just doing something because we're floating along through the chaos of raising kids? And so I'm interested, did you have any experiences in coming up with this list where you thought this is part of our value and it's something that's just occurring to me as I'm writing this book or doing this kind of overall evaluation. Yes, 100%. Because you do sort of peel everything back and say like, okay, you did great on that sports team.

18:54But what I really want you to understand is that you should appreciate your blessings out loud in real time. That's lesson number eight. Appreciate your blessings out loud in real time. Stop as this is happening and appreciate it right now. That is how we like to live in our family. But you have to say that you have to remind everybody of that, right? Because you can get so wrapped up in the accomplishment mode. And, you know, another one of the lessons is that your life is measured in your relationships, not your accomplishments.

19:28Heidi Raykeil:and that's hard. That's a tough one because we are an accomplishment culture and we are definitely an accomplishment family. I mean, we're like, you know, it's not that nobody's paying attention, but it is that at the end of the day, those accomplishments should happen in service of your relationships. So by that, I mean, if you do really well in life and you make a lot of money, What are you doing with the money? Are you taking your family on an adventure? Yes. Are you going out and just buying stuff? No, right? Like you've got to use the blessings and use those tools you have in your life to enrich your relationships.

20:10And that is something I feel like we say, but it's important, obviously, most of all to model this when you're raising your kids. But then for me to like put those things down on paper was an interesting process. Yeah, it would be a good exercise for everyone to do to some level to say, what am I trying to teach my kids? Yeah, I love the idea of the blank pages, especially to say, like, hopefully we have showed you these values every day of your young and teenage lives. But now we're putting a fine point on what that lesson we hope was. For sure. And that's why I really did try to kind of keep them super short.

20:55And they're not specific, really, to any age. So even though the book was written for a high school graduating senior, I actually really did take a hard look at all the lessons and say, this is appropriate for an eight-year-old or an 80-year-old or kind of anyone in between. So there's probably another book about what not to do on a Saturday night. I left that out. And it's more life lessons. We do have a laundry lesson in there, you know, or rinsing something is not the same as washing it, Margaret. So I saw it. I felt personally attacked, but I'm not I'm not here to judge. But then, you know, things like life is lived in chapters.

21:35If you're sad when a chapter ends and it's time to turn the page, it means you did it

21:39Heidi Raykeil:right. You're stealing my ending, but I was going to end with that because that's exactly it. Like you're supposed if you're sad when your kid is leaving for college, that's because it was so great. Yes. Not because it wasn't. Yes. And if they feel that way, too, you know, so like even young kids, when a chapter ends, they're leaving camp or they're ending something, even if it's not anything as monumental as leaving home. If you feel that emotional pull and you feel sad, well, good for you. That means this was awesome. We did a recent episode talking about like parenting panics or just general societal panics through the ages, like the radio is going to ruin everything.

22:19Heidi Raykeil:television is going to ruin everything and now here we are with many things are going to ruin everything and what we kind of came down on is that change is scary to humans so that when we see the change coming we tend to catastrophize it and be scared of it and resist it and so much of this pain of like oh my god it's only five weeks until we drive her to her new life the fear of what's coming the fear of what if it's going to be different and it is going to be like it is going to change. A chapter is ending. But change doesn't have to be bad. You see what I'm saying? That like change is unavoidable.

22:51Heidi Raykeil:Yes, a change is coming. But it's like the fear of the change. And you're like digging your fingernails as you're being dragged down the road towards their new college. That's where the pain is. Definitely. I've thought about this a lot just kind of personally that almost like, is it bad that humans feel this deeply? Is it actually like from an evolutionary perspective, is it bad for us that we are this emotionally invested in one another? Look at the way we process not just our own children and families inside of our homes, but grief and this inability to accept when tragedies happen because we are so deeply emotionally connected, which is what makes the human experience so beautiful, but it actually makes it really hard to move through life as a human being that feels deeply because you're stuck all the time.

23:48You can turn the TV on and be affected by something for the rest of the day that isn't even happening to you. But just because we are empathetic and empathic creatures, we really take on all these emotional experiences of ourselves and other people. So yeah, I mean, I think that's part of this moment. Also, as a parent is, will their college experience be this amazing four years that we had with our friends and that we still look back on as the best four years of your life? You're not really an adult yet. You're not really responsible for anything yet. You're going to have the best four years of your life.