Embracing Ch-ch-changes
My 15 year old daughter recently asked me to give her a kiss good night. I love that she still wants one. But as I leaned into kiss her, she put her arms around my neck and said, “Mom, our family will never be the same once my brother leaves.” You see, her brother, my son our first born, is leaving to go to college. She’s so right because somehow his leaving seems like one of the most seismic changes in my life.
Everywhere I go these days I run into something that tells me I’m supposed to “embrace change.” It’s on signs, t-shirts and mugs. Yet every time I see one of these popular culture prescriptions I just want to run screaming, “NOOO.”
At my own wedding my husband vowed to embrace change. When we got married we wrote our own vows to each other. I don’t remember what I said, it was something in a high squeaky voice about love. But my husband really thought about it and wrote all about change. It went something like this: our looks will change, where we live will change, even what we do will change, but my love for you will never change. Cue: collective “aww.” Cue: my silent scream.
For me, as much as his vow was meant with love, somehow it felt more like a curse. Getting married is one of the huge epic changes of your life. Especially when, like me, you are young and stupid and all of 22. I had only just left my parent’s house a few years prior for college. While I thought that was a big change, it came with a life-line attached to my parents…a credit card paid for by them.
When we first got married I didn’t really feel like my life had changed at all. I was still a student, living in an apartment with very little furniture, the only difference was this big hairy man sleeping next to me. Except he didn’t even live with me right away. He had accepted a job which required that he do sales training away from home. He hit the road spending the next three months living in hotels. At home I could pretend we’d never even married. I was in school just like before, living in the same place, not cooking dinner for myself.
When he finally returned home it was in the middle of my first year law school finals. I told him to turn around, leave and don’t come back until I was finished studying. He didn’t listen to me, but he remained very quiet for the next few weeks, which was a big change for him.
The next big change for us occurred when we left New York for Washington, D.C. Moving created a psychic upheaval for me. I started lamenting all the things I would miss about, and that I’d never done in, New York. For example, I really was sad about leaving the doormen at our apartment. I knew I’d always see my family, but Joseph, the doorman who had been such an important every-day part of our life would be a mere memory.
And I cried that in all our time living in New York City I’d never been to the Cloisters, a museum in Upper Manhattan. It’s not like I ever made the effort to go there, but I was sad I was leaving before having visited.
The thing is once the Band-Aid was ripped off and I moved to D.C. I did embrace that change and became a Washingtonian. I argued about politics. I complained about traffic on the Beltway. And I bragged about how hard I worked. But does changing cities truly change who you are fundamentally? I might have known how to eat a Maryland Crab but I still didn’t like them. Maybe moving cities is just a change of scenery.
Because the next huge change for me came years later when I changed careers and left the law to become an actor. Looking back it seems like an awfully stupid thing to have done, considering it definitely changed our bank account. But I couldn’t do the work I do now in leadership communications if I hadn’t gone to law school and then become an actor – who knew it was the best training in the world for a job that I didn’t even know existed when I made the change.
But even though moving cities and careers seem like huge changes, it is living through life milestones, like having a family or losing a loved one, or consciously working to change behavior that truly changes who you are.
Becoming a parent, you become instantly self-less, you learn what unconditional love really means, and you are able to handle disgusting bodily fluids without gagging because it’s from your adorable baby.
I’ve watched my mother change immensely since my father died. She had been part of a couple for over 50 years, doing everything together. But she constantly surprises me with how willing she is to overcome fears and force of habit to morph into an incredibly brave and independent woman. She, who always held hands with him in the movies, goes alone. She, who was always the passenger drives into Manhattan three times a week. She, who never traveled without my father, has traveled as far away as Russia by herself and this year she’s planning to travel to Iceland by herself.
When I was in my 20’s I embarked on a Woody Allen-esque psycho-analytic journey. I wanted desperately to change who I thought I was at the time, which was mostly a miserable post-adolescent. When I finally “finished” my analysis I know I had definitely changed. I’d changed how I viewed the world. I was happier, calmer, and able to solve my problems in a more thoughtful way. That could be attributed to all that thinking about myself, or it could just be I got 11 years older.
I heard about a recent study at Harvard University that people underestimate how much they change over a lifetime. The study said that in essence we do change, every 10 years or so, even though we don’t think it’s happening. Life is a process of growing and changing. It goes much faster when we are younger but, still change continues even as we get older. Some of that change occurs because of external circumstances, some of it happens by our choice, and some of it happens to us because not only are we creatures of habit, but we are creatures of flexibility and adaptability.
I thought the most difficult change for me was moving from Washington to Rochester. I cried for three years. For goodness sakes, I’ve made almost a whole writing career talking about that change.
But in the end the last 13 years have brought about some of the greatest changes of our lives. Our children have grown from babies into independent young people. My career has grown and changed in ways I never could have imagined taking me to places far away and providing great work and community right near home.
And my husband, well, he’s lost a lot of hair and he watches a lot more sports than he used to. Most important, he’s helped me to embrace change, and to be the best person I can be in the world, while letting me know he loves me no matter how much I change. He vowed it.
My daughter is right, and she’s wrong about our family. Of course the dynamic will change when our son goes to college. He’ll be far away, growing up and learning a lot. And we’ll be home wondering what he’s doing. But we’ll also be growing and changing at the same time. But, even though change is inevitable, I prefer to think of the things that won’t change, not matter how far away we are from each other: that we love each other and we’ll always be family.