Adult children and breakups: How grieved is a parent allowed to be?

I could sense the thought hovering, slinking its way sideways like a floater across your field of vision. M’s first real relationship—long-distance during her senior year at college, then blossoming when the pandemic sent her abruptly home without a graduation —had been a good one. Her graduation and her big brother’s wedding had both been canceled in that one grim ping-pong week in March of 2020—blame it on the NBA—but two years later the wedding was back on, and she’d be a bridesmaid in lilac, and her boyfriend would be a groomsman in a gray tuxedo. The larger group spent more time together that first year or so—in fragile bubbles inside, or liberated outdoors—than we had in years, and even if I was anxious and vaguely guilty about my email-job privilege, my “30 years on the working-mother treadmill” brain recognized that I was finally getting that vaunted but elusive “quality time.” My own view into my daughter’s burgeoning romance was artificially close up, as they lived with me in our WFH bubble. We experience the shifting alliances and fallings-out, see the anguish of the parents whose kid isn’t part of the crowd anymore, and feel it ourselves during middle school mean-girl drama.