Identity Grief: Why Sending Your Kid to College Can Feel Like Losing Yourself

For my daughter's entire senior year, I counted each "last" like a prisoner ticking off days in their sentence: The last first day of school. Her last soccer game. Her last birthday at home. Then prom. Then graduation. Then it was our last month/week/day/dinner as a family.

In every moment, I was deeply nostalgic for a time I was currently living in. However present I might have tried to be, it was being fully overshadowed by thoughts of a time I wouldn't have anymore. Her new normal (about to leave) and mine (being left) were looming. We were about to go our separate ways, and I hated it—all of it.

I spent a moody year bouncing in emotional duality—one moment grateful and proud, the next resentful and angry (mostly at my lack of control over this seemingly normal circumstance: time). When well-meaning friends would attempt to shift my perspective with a cheerful, "This is a happy time! She's growing up!" I would resent their out-of-touch perspective and retreat into a deeper loneliness—one I never thought to fully name. I felt a swirling mix of despair, worry, longing, grumpiness, and sadness that embarrassed me to even admit. I'd wonder, am I the only one feeling this deeply about her leaving? What is wrong with me?

Then I learned a term that was actually helpful: identity grief. I had heard of anticipatory grief (the grief of anticipating a loss, which I was very obviously fluent in), but identity grief was new to me. And apparently, it might be new to you too: it is one of the most common and least discussed experiences in loss.

Identity grief forces us to ask: Who are we without this role? Without this routine? Who are we if we aren't the mother we've been? Or the caregiver. Sister. Daughter. Friend. Who are we without the job? Who are we without being needed? What do we do with our time, our attention, and our need to give? What is our purpose now?

As a society, we have gotten better at talking about grief when a person dies. We don't yet know how to talk about grief when a version of ourselves does. And dropping a child at college is one of the most reliable places that second kind of grief shows up, because it isn't just your child's chapter ending. It's yours. For 18 years, you might have spent a large part of your days, your identity and your entire nervous system around a role. Then one day you drive away from a dorm, and that role, as you knew it, is gone.

What Identity Grief Actually Is

Identity grief is the loss that follows the end of a role, a chapter, or a version of yourself you were deeply invested in. It doesn't require anyone to die. It requires only that something you organized your life around—your days, your calendar, your sense of who you are—shifts or disappears. A job loss. A marriage ending. A diagnosis. And, very commonly, a kid leaving for school.

In her groundbreaking 1969 book, On Death and Dying, author Elisabeth Kübler-Ross famously listed five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These were built for a more traditional kind of loss, but they map onto this one with eerie precision. For identity grief around a child going to college, denial sounds like "I'll see them all the time—it will be like nothing has changed.” Anger can show up as pure grumpiness, snapping at your partner over nothing, resenting the school for not communicating enough about move-in day or campus safety. Bargaining sounds like volunteering for one more committee so you can hold onto the identity a little longer. Then there's the flat, heavy day when the loss is simply present with the ache of an empty room down the hall: depression. Acceptance often takes time and looks like a moment where things just are, without the need to control or worry. These stages aren't linear. There's no graduating from one and moving to the next. Instead, they dance around each other, often showing up at the slightest trigger.

My friend Claire Bidwell Smith, a grief therapist, author, and educator, makes the case that anxiety functions as its own stage of grief: the hypervigilance, the sense that something bad might happen, the helplessness given all the uncertainty. And David Kessler, who wrote the book Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief, adds that "meaning" follows acceptance. Eventually, you find ways to make sense of the loss in a purposeful way.

Again, none of this is linear. You will feel proud and pissed in the same afternoon. Multiple truths can exist at once. The experience can feel like too much, and like something you're capable of handling. Both things can be true.

Why It Hits So Hard

This moment brings up thoughts of our own mortality. We're in midlife now. We might be experiencing our child's college prep, thinking about how our own time at college was just a few years ago. We might wonder where the time went, regret how we've spent it, or feel concerned that we're not where we thought we'd be at this age and stage. These are hard things to think about, but they can also be so helpful. If we're going to course-correct our lives to meet our goals and expectations, it's better to do it now than later.

Part of why college drop-off identity grief in particular lands so hard comes down to something called enmeshment: the degree to which your sense of self has become intertwined with a role, rather than simply held within it. There's a real difference between being a mother alongside other roles and being The Mother; between having a child at home and organizing your entire identity around having one. Mothering is a role that, culturally, we are actively praised for merging our whole selves into. Nobody hands you a manual for staying your own separate person underneath it. That’s actually culturally discouraged.

So when the circumstance changes your role, the self that was doing the identifying can feel unmoored. The very trait that made you extraordinary in the role, your total devotion, the way you tracked every soccer game and packed every lunch and knew every school day off by heart, is exactly what makes its ending feel so seismic. The more you gave, the harder the shift.

This obviously isn't a case for loving your kids less. It's an invitation to notice, ideally well before drop-off, whether there's a version of you underneath the role that you'd like to nurture. Start planting those seeds now, whatever that looks like for you, and you'll soften the change. If nothing comes to mind, if you're feeling stuck, that's okay too. Give yourself a beat. Either way, start with these tools below.

How to Move Through It

1. Name it, without the caveats. Everything starts with awareness. Say it plainly, out loud or on paper: I am grieving the version of myself that was a mother to a kid at home. Try to avoid adding, "but I'm so lucky" or "but I know other people have it worse." Those caveats are how we minimize grief before we've let ourselves actually feel it. This is a loss, and you're allowed to feel it. Just notice how often these thoughts come up.
2. Expect to feel two things at once. Pride and grief. Excitement and dread. Relief and heartbreak. This is the accurate emotional experience of the change you both wanted for your child, and of losing something inside. Let both be true without needing to resolve them into one tidy feeling. I like to use the phrase "Yes...and" like "Yes, they're happy at college…  I'm adjusting to this new normal."
3. Go looking for what you're also gaining. In the thick of loss, your brain fixates on what's disappearing and won't, on its own, search for what you're gaining alongside it. You have to do that on purpose. I call it looking for the good. For me, it turned out to be an entirely new, adult relationship with my daughter, hours of time back for my own work and friendships, and, unexpectedly, a rescue dog. The gains are real. You just have to go looking for them.
4. Build the parts of yourself that live outside the role. In the weeks before and after drop-off, put something on the calendar that has nothing to do with being a parent: a trip with a friend, a new class, a fun project you were deprioritizing. I prioritized friendship and buffered the return from college drop-off with two days at a campy mountain resort with my close friend. It turned out to be one of my better ideas because it reminded me I could trust myself to be a good friend and have a good time even when things felt heavy.
5. Give yourself the grace you'd give a friend. If your best friend told you she'd been crying every time she said the word "graduation," you would not tell her to get over it (I hope). You'd tell her that sounds so hard. You'd remind her she's capable of doing hard things. Say that to yourself. Commit to real self-care. Build routines and habits that are loving towards yourself: sleep, movement, solitude, real conversations, professional support, whatever fills you back up. This is maintenance for a nervous system that just went through something enormous. And an investment in what's next.

Where We Are Now

That hot August day, her freshman year, after flying across the country, we spent 11 hours unpacking 20 boxes, three duffels, and two Target shopping carts. We hauled and recycled and measured shelves and figured out tension rods for curtains (that I insisted she needed) while she put up LED lights, and by the end of it, we were a real team, the two of us, assembling a life in a room just slightly larger than the bed itself. My daughter's dorm room—her new home—3,000 miles from me. I remember thinking, just keep doing, because the busyness feels better than realizing what this all means.

I was not okay. Not that day, and honestly, I hadn't been for a while. But after drop-off, I slowly began to adjust. I got used to her quiet bedroom and her empty seat at the kitchen table. I traded quantity of in-person time for FaceTimes, shared memes, and quality visits—times together that became more concentrated family moments. And that felt good. I noticed all the things I gained in this new arrangement: time for myself and friends, working on my business, a lighter mental load, and less driving. And all the things our family gained, too. We found a comfortable new normal... and you will too.

And then, last May, she graduated. I sat with yet another last, my final time being with her on that East Coast campus...ever. I found myself nostalgic for each of the times I'd tucked her into her dorm over the years, noticing how every one of them had gotten easier logistically and, to some extent, emotionally.

We gave her roots and wings. And now I'm here again, in a new kind of identity discovery, figuring out how to mother a grown woman who is still my child but gets to be her own person, too. This time, I’m doing it with a little more practice at rebuilding myself along the way.

Abbie Schiller is a goal coach, author, certified death doula, and regular contributor to the goop podcast. Listen to her recent episode on Identity Grief and visit her website for coaching courses and free resources and guides.