ElderChicks

I’ve been thinking about change as opposed to CHANGE, the transformative kind where your life is never the same from that instant on. Fortunately that kind of change doesn’t happen very often because who could manage life on such a roller coaster.

Transformative changes are of two kinds. The first kind you know is happening when it happens. Like when you get married or find out that you have a chronic disease. For good or ill, you know your life will never be the same from then on. The second kind of transformative change is the kind you only recognize when you look back, sometimes way back, and you realize only in retrospect that your life had taken a new direction from that time on.

A transformative change of the second kind came to me one day when I was the parent of three young children, still a stay-at home mom as most of us were in the early nineteen sixties. I was probably a bit cranky that day, pulled as usual in many directions: getting the kids ready for school, fixing lunches, planning dinner, attending a PTA committee meeting, making phone calls for the upcoming election, taking the car in for its annual inspection. And that was just during the morning! I knew I had to fit in time to phone my mother. I hadn’t phoned her for two days so I knew I had to deal with the guilt trip she would lay on me when she answered the phone.“I was so worried when I didn’t hear from you,” she said. She often said that.

It seemed she didn’t have enough to occupy her once my brother and I left her home to build our own homes –so she occupied herself with us.

“Mom,” I said, “Why don’t you volunteer at the hospital or maybe get a job? You have such good organizational skills.”

“Well I would love to volunteer if you would go with me,” my mother replied. “And get a job? What? Announce to the world that my husband doesn’t make a good living?”

Well, I loved my mother dearly. She was a kind and caring woman who always treated me with respect and dignity. She trusted me more than many of my friends’ mothers trusted them and as a result I was often pretty hard on myself. She encouraged me to be independent and self-reliant. And from both my parents I learned how to develop close relationships with other people.

As I continued to find my way as wife, mother, and woman, however, that conversation would often pop into my mind. I knew there was something wrong with the picture, that my mother had allowed her life to revolve exclusively around her husband and children and she seemed to have nothing left for herself. Oftimes her love for me felt like a stranglehold of obligations that sometimes became a chore instead of a pleasure. I knew I could not hurt my mother by telling her this. I also was determined that I would not lay that trip on my children.

With that conversation increasingly replaying in my mind, I began to make some conscious decisions regarding my life. When I decided to go back to work, then back to school, then look ahead and prepare for the time when my children would be on their own, it was always with the knowledge that I am a person for whom wifehood and motherhood are a huge part of who I am –but not the whole story. I knew from early days in my marriage and motherhood that my life would be different from my mother’s. But it was that conversation that became a truly a transformative moment for me, although I certainly didn’t realize it then.

I know that my children understand my need to be a person that embraces them but also stretches beyond them. My late husband also understood and encouraged me in this. He was a strong person in his own right and fostered and respected strength and independence in others, especially me. I hope my children regard us, their parents, with great love and affection, but I hope they don’t feel strangled by a needy mom, as I often felt. I like to think my relationships with my children and grandchildren –all of them grown up now– are those of equal, independent, yet closely connected adults.

Have there been transformative moments, events, or conversations in your life? That you look back on now and know they were of greater significance than you were aware of at the time?  Have you acted on them? Do you wish you had? [Leave a comment here.]