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My son is studying abroad in Spain this year. I’m trying to let go, but it’s harder than I expected.

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In a few months, I will watch my 18-year-old kid walk away to start a life of his own in another country. I can already picture it: the way I’ll stand there a little longer than necessary, trying to hold onto a moment that’s already passing.

I know that later, I’ll return to our apartment and feel the quiet in a way I haven’t before. Not because it’s empty, but because something has shifted. A chapter that once defined my daily life will have closed, whether I’m ready for it or not.

Before my son leaves for his study abroad program in Spain this fall, we’re still moving through our routines. He’s asking me questions about living on his own. We still have this time to share meals, routines, and small daily conversations. But everything feels different now. I know it won’t last in the same way. I feel like I’m standing in a space that is both present and forward-looking at the same time.

I’ve started to realize that letting go isn’t something that happens the day your child leaves. It starts long before.

My role as his mother has changed

I’m already grieving a moment that hasn’t happened yet. Every form we fill out feels like a step toward goodbye.

He’s my oldest kid, and lately I find myself caught between who he is now and who he used to be. I think about his first steps, the early words, and the way he used to need me for everything. Back then, parenting felt physical. I was holding, guiding, and protecting him. Now, it feels internal.

This past year has already been full of change. We moved from New York to Portugal, a decision that reshaped our lives in ways I’m still processing. I left behind familiarity, stability, and everything we knew to build something new for us. That move required courage, trust, and letting go.

Now, just as I’ve adjusted to this new life, I’m preparing to let go again, this time of my son as he steps into his own.

I wonder if I’ve done everything I was supposed to do as his mom

Have I prepared him enough for the world? For independence? For the moments when I won’t be there to help?

Because that’s what scares me the most: not being by his side if something goes wrong, or not being able to step in quickly, fix it, and protect him.

Letting go isn’t a single moment; it’s a process. It means encouraging him to make his own decisions, even when I want to guide them. It’s teaching him how to manage his money and reminding him that he can’t eat takeout every night.

It’s watching him schedule his own doctor appointments, handle his responsibilities, and figure things out on his own. I have to step back when my instinct is to step in. That’s not easy.

There’s a constant tension between wanting to protect him and knowing that growth requires space.

This experience has created an internal shift in how I see parenting

For so long, being a good parent meant being present, involved, and attentive to every need. Now, I’m realizing it also means knowing when to step back and not holding on too tightly.

I have to trust that what I’ve taught him will carry forward, even when I’m not there.

I imagine the moments ahead, the ones we haven’t reached yet, like him standing in a new apartment in a different country, calling me to ask how to fix a recipe. Or asking questions I used to answer before he even had to ask.

I know I’ll answer the same way every time, with patience, with love, and with delight. Because no matter how far he goes, I want him to know this: He can always call home, and I will always pick up.




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Maye Musk describes her son Elon’s living space: ‘The shower only has one towel’

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Elon Musk is one of those guys who only has one towel, according to his mother.

In an X post on Tuesday, Maye Musk described her son’s living space in Boca Chica, southern Texas, near SpaceX’s Starbase launch site.

“There is no food in the fridge,” the billionaire’s mother, 77, said. “The garage where I slept is on the right.”

She added, “The shower only has one towel so I left it for Elon. That was okay with me.”

Maye Musk wrote that she had been primed to live like this since childhood, saying that she had spent many weeks in the Kalahari Desert as a child without showering because there was no water.

“I think my parents prepared me for this luxury,” she said, adding a laughing emoji to the end of her X post.

Musk’s Boca Chica house is a 3-bedroom home worth $45,000, he said in a 2022 podcast interview.

This is not the first time Maye Musk has ratted on her son’s living conditions.

In 2023, she responded to Musk’s tweet, in which he said he slept on a friend’s couch the weekend prior. She said she has “many memories of sleeping on mattresses or blankets on the floor, on couches, or a bed in the garage,” when she visited him in Texas.

In that tweet, she said it was “still better than on the ground in the Kalahari Desert with lions or hyenas nearby.”

Musk has made headlines several times for his austere and modest lifestyle. The Tesla, SpaceX, and X CEO, who is currently worth about $664 billion and is the richest man alive, is known for sleeping on the floor in his offices and going to bed at 3 a.m.

“Back to spending 24/7 at work and sleeping in conference/server/factory rooms,” he said in a May X post after quitting his role in the Department of Government Efficiency to focus on his companies.

Despite Musk’s slim inventory of towels, he’s previously said the habit that had the biggest positive impact on his life was showering.

Representatives for Musk did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.




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My partner and I live in different homes. Our son moves between, and we each enjoy having time to ourselves each week.

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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Luana Ribeira, founder of Dauntless PR. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Little about my relationship with Al is traditional. For starters, Al was my former husband’s best friend. After my husband and I divorced, I moved to Portugal, where Al was living. I was planning on spending time with Al as a friend, but the second time we hung out, he called my ex to say, “There’s something here.” Luckily, my ex gave his blessing.

I started dating Al soon after, in 2017. In 2020, we moved to the UK, where I’m from. That’s when we decided to have separate bedrooms. We both were having trouble sleeping at the time, and enjoyed having our own space. We had a spare room, so Al started sleeping in there.

Eventually, we wanted even more space from each other. At the time, my two teenage daughters were living with us, and the house was loud. Al craved quiet, and that was fine with me — I wanted him to take care of himself. He converted an existing warehouse on our property into a bedsit (similar to a studio apartment). He slept there and used it when he needed quiet time to create art or watch TV.

We wanted different settings for our home

Last June, we moved back to Portugal, with our 4-year-old son, Celyn. By that point in our relationship, Al and I recognized that we live completely opposite lifestyles at home. I like creature comforts and wanted my dream lakeside home in Portugal. Al was interested in becoming even more self-sufficient, living off-grid if possible.

Al already owned about an acre of land in Portugal. He put a yurt on the land, and now lives there without running water and with only limited solar power. The one modern amenity I insisted on was wifi, so I can get a hold of him and Celyn.

I meanwhile rent a two-bedroom home with a pool. I can see a nearby lake from my windows. I’m still in a rural area, but nowhere near as rural as Al.

We follow a strict weekly schedule

We have a family schedule that might look familiar to separated parents, though Al and I are very much together. On Sunday nights, Al and Celyn go to the yurt. I work long days on Monday and Tuesday, and also have time to swim and make any appointments I need to.

On Wednesday morning, I pick Celyn up. That’s my favorite part of the week, seeing him run down the lane toward me. I have Celyn on my own until Friday night, when Al comes to spend the weekend with us. That family time always happens at my house, since it’s more comfortable.

Our weekends as a family are sacred to us. It’s also nice to have one-on-one time with our son and to have alone time built into the week.

This arrangement lets us be ourselves

Our homes are about 50 minutes apart right now. If something pops up with work, I can’t just send Celyn to his dad’s on a whim. Sometimes I feel like I’m driving all the time, so I’ll probably move closer to Al in the future.

Financially, there’s not a huge expense involved with having two homes. Al already owned his land. I’m the sole earner in our relationship, so I bought the yurt, and I finance projects on the land as they come up. Luckily, there are a few bills with an off-grid homestead.

I know this isn’t for everyone, but I’m glad that Al and I can do what’s right for us. We want to support each other, and don’t want to ask our partner to change who they are. Living apart gives us the space we need to be ourselves, while still being a family.




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My son bought a $2 car and learned how to fix it himself. It gave him the independence he was craving.

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My eldest felt a strong urge to own a car for most of his teenage years. He would pop into the living room and show his dad and me his latest internet find, usually a 20-year-old jalopy with questionable reliability costing several thousand dollars.

Each summer break, he would talk about buying a car with us. Each time, we wouldn’t say no. We would just urge him to consider his situation as a full-time student with an uncertain future.

We provided transportation to and from school, and while there, he walked, rode a bike, and grabbed rides from friends. Each time, he decided on his own that it might not be the smartest time to invest a couple of thousand dollars in a car of questionable repair.

He got a deal from a family friend

The summer before his junior year of college, however, a family friend offered him a deal he couldn’t pass up. It was a 20-year-old Volvo wagon that had a run-in with a deer. The front end was crumpled, it was undrivable, and he didn’t have the title. But the price was right — $2, twice the friend’s original purchase price of a buck.

In some ways, it was a bold move. My son didn’t have much experience in car mechanics. During that school break, he put money and time into repairs. He straightened the front radiator support with a winch so all the parts would fit again. He replaced the radiator and flushed out the intercooler. By the end, it stayed in motion long enough to limp to a storage barn for the winter.


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The author’s son learned how to fix the car with YouTube videos.

Courtesy of the author



The next summer, it was his main focus. He installed a new radiator fan, bought a new battery. Replaced two tires and had them aligned. Put in a new headlight and did more bodywork. He cleaned it, inside and out. And just a couple of days before returning to college, the crowning glory: a salvaged hood that perfectly matched the golden hue of his car.

He learned a lot from fixing the car

There was a fair amount of angst. Figuring out the process for issuing a new title. Hunting down the owner who last had it and arranging a meeting. Ordering the wrong or incomplete parts and having to send them back. Determining what needed to be fixed and how much it cost. Calculating how much he should spend, even after fixing it up, the car was probably only worth about $2,000.

He elected to do much of the work himself, spending hours at the “University of YouTube.” At one point, as he lamented the money he had spent so far, with the possibility that it would all be for naught, my husband asked him how much a college credit hour costs. My son looked it up. It was exactly what he had spent so far on the car. My husband said, “Haven’t you learned a lot?”


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The author says her son learned so much from fixing his own car.

Courtesy of the author



That helpful reframing stuck: The night before he drove the car to college, my son commented, “Hey, I got a free car at the end of that college class.” We celebrated with him that evening, telling him how proud we were of his persistence and frugality, of his push to learn something new.

He got the independence he wanted

Seeing him drive off in that car left an indelible impression on me. Armed with his insurance’s roadside assistance, a toolbox gifted by his dad, and a bag of extra fluids in the passenger seat, he set out on the 8-hour, 57-minute drive to York College in Pennsylvania from our home in Kentucky. He couldn’t shake the small, satisfied smile on his face. I couldn’t shake my delight and my apprehension.

Being the mom that I am, I asked him to text whenever he stopped so we could track him on his journey. First stop: at the coffee shop halfway, our usual lunch break, and the new thrift store next door. Next, at a Civilian Conservation Corps museum, he saw signs along the highway. Finally, in the parking lot of his dorm. Even through text, I could sense the satisfaction and pride he felt for accomplishing that trip in his own ride.

In the ensuing months, the $2 car has safely delivered him each week to his internship and to a friend’s house for fall break. It has given him a measure of independence he didn’t have before. And it gave him something we, as parents, couldn’t, no matter how much we wanted to: a sense of self-sufficiency. That was something he had to earn.

We could only encourage him, support him, and talk him through his next steps, then see if he succeeded or failed. In the end, he knew that he could handle the road ahead by himself.




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Hilary Duff says she divorced when her son was 2 to show him you have to ‘fight for your happiness’

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Hilary Duff, 38, says she walked away from her first marriage because she didn’t want to sacrifice her own happiness — even as a young mom.

On Wednesday’s episode of “Call Her Daddy,” the “Lizzie McGuire” star spoke about navigating a divorce in her late 20s and how motherhood shaped her approach.

Duff split from her first husband, Mike Comrie, in 2015. They share a son, Luca, who was born in 2012.

“I knew from my parents’ divorce that I was going to show my kid that you’ve got to fight for your happiness. And I knew that it was going to be better to do it when he was younger than it was going to be when he was five and aware, or eight and aware,” Duff told podcast host Alex Cooper.

Duff added that kids can sometimes blame themselves when their parents’ marriage doesn’t work out.

“I was like, if Luca cannot remember this and have two lives that exist that he can be happy in and feel secure in, I think we’re winning,” she said.

Duff said therapy was essential in helping her process the end of her marriage, and ultimately, the experience taught her to stand up for herself.

“You’ve got to fight for yourself, and it doesn’t matter that you have kids. Your kids are going to be OK. You know what I mean? You just have to show them that you also matter,” Duff said.

As a parent, it’s easy to lose yourself in your child and feel like their needs should outweigh your own, she said. But she added it was also “important” not to let that be the deciding factor in whether she stayed in an unhappy marriage.

Duff added that mom guilt can sometimes overshadow her own feelings.

“There’s this part of your brain where you’re like, ‘Yeah, I’m still in here, and I’m still me,’ and then there’s this huge shadow over it that’s like, ‘But everything for the family and everything for your kid,'” she said.

Duff added that finding balance between motherhood and her own identity is something she has to work at.

“It’s a constant conversation to choose yourself and choose something you know that you enjoy outside of family life and kids,” she said.

In 2019, Duff married Matthew Koma, and the couple has three daughters.

Duff isn’t the only celebrity who has spoken about navigating divorce with kids.

In a 2022 podcast appearance, Kim Kardashian said she tries to protect Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, in the “eyes of my kids, for my kids.”

“One day my kids will thank me for not sitting here and bashing their dad when I could. They’ll thank me and I’ll privately answer anything that they want to know. But it’s not my place anymore to jump in,” she said.

In February, Miranda Kerr said choosing forgiveness helped her co-parent peacefully with her ex, Orlando Bloom.

“When you have a child with someone else, they’re always going to be that person’s parent for the rest of their life. There are going to be situations where you’re going to need to talk if you like it or not. So why not make it harmonious?” Kerr said.




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I have the best talks with my preteen son when I drive him to school in the morning. I hope he knows I’m always here for him.

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When my son was still under 5, I worked at the local library. In my free time, my son was basically my best buddy. My supervisor at the time had teenagers, so she was in a different parenting stage than I was.

I remember her saying that the secret to keeping her kids close was to drive them around as much as possible. This kept her kids talking to her and enabled her to maintain close relationships with them.

She was so right with her advice.

My son is now a tween

My son just turned 12, and the shift from boy to teenager seems to have happened overnight. He is becoming more independent and less talkative — with me, but not his social circle.

I know it’s the natural order of things for him to spread his wings and to push back a bit against me. But sometimes I just really miss my best buddy and all the fun we had spending time together when he was little. Now, when he’s home from school, he’s often in his room talking on the phone with his friends or playing games online with them.

I think my former boss’s wisdom stuck with me, because the idea of my son growing up and not wanting to talk to me scared me. I’ve come to realize that driving my son around whenever I get the chance is basically priceless. Right now, drives with him are primarily to and from school, but during football or basketball seasons, all of the practices and games really add up. This year, sixth grade has really felt like a turning point, because I’ve noticed an increase in invites to parties, hangouts, and sleepovers.

I realize that as he gets older, these social outings will only increase. And then one day, when he’s closer to age 16, he’ll likely have a part-time job to add to his schedule. As long as he doesn’t have a car, I know I’ll be his main source of transportation. Instead of dreading, I know these are actually the hidden opportunities, like diamonds in the rough, to remain connected to him as he grows up.

It’s best to allow our conversations to flow naturally

I never try to force a topic on him, because I have found that it’s not the best timing for discipline-based or serious talks. I’m sure he feels trapped, so he shuts down, and it ruins the safe space I’m trying to develop out of our car rides. Allowing the conversation to flow organically is when he’ll surprise me and ask me something random or open up about something that’s been bothering him.

Even if he doesn’t open up every time, I know I’m giving him the space to do so. Often, after a few minutes of being stuck in the car together, one of us will start talking about something. I think having the music on and sightseeing on our way everywhere gives our brains distractions and talking points. It feels like the car is sometimes the white flag zone, where we stop arguing and start talking again.

While he’s mostly reserved, there are other times when he’s more open and chatty, and I just let him vent and do my best to listen. It’s likely therapeutic to have someone who will just listen to him at his age, but it might also be easier for him to open up to me side-by-side instead of face-to-face. Knowing there’s an endpoint, such as knowing we’ll be at his school in five minutes, likely helps too.

I hope I’m also sending him the message that I won’t stop showing up

Willingly taking him everywhere he needs to go daily, I think, is communicating to him that I’m not going to stop showing up for him. That no matter how tense things may be at times between us, I’m going to continue to be there for all of it.

I think it reassures him that I’m not going to give up on my job as his mom, even when things get tough. I’ll be sitting there in silence if that’s what he needs, but the message I hope to send him is: I’m still here.




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