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.]
I left home when I was 13 to make a different life for myself. The guilt came with me, even to this day, but this poem always helps.
On Children
by Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Yes! Our children are gifts entrusted to our care and nurture. They are not our property or possessions. We hope that love is the by-product.
As I read some of the topics and posts on this sight I cannot trace the path of links that brought me here. It is not necessary really that I do so, only that I am here. Tears begin to well in my eyes unchecked, uncalled from an unknown source. I believe it is gratitude or perhaps a sort of relief that there are entities, fellow human beings like myself, who wish to speak, be listened to and responded to.
I began my day, today, as most of my days have begun for the past year; thoughts roiling through my mind faster almost than I can grab them for contemplation. So this day I will choose to go back to school. Always the old story flits though my mind of the man at 40 or 45 years bemoaning the loss of his dream to become an MD. College years, intern years, residency years; he will be almost 50 or 55 before he can practice as a Doctor! His good friends response: “You will still be that age regardless of whether you go back to school or not!”
This is the hard part.
I am a woman of almost 60 years, still hitting on all cylinders and reasonably fit; I need to be financially independent! This may hit a cord with some of you “ElderChicks”. I have a BBA and I want to go to architectural school in my home state of Arizona. I’m not worried at this point about qualifying to attend a school though perhaps I should. It has been 20 years since I last attended school. How will I do it? Come with me as I make the journey. Maybe I will help another in my position to grab hold of a dream and hang on firmly with sincere intent to SEE as young as you THINK.
I am re-reading some comments on the blog and I came across yours, Larkin. And I am wondering. Have you done it? Gone back to school? If you still follow us ElderChicks, you might have read my post “The Road Not Taken” and saw that I, too, wanted to pursue architecture mid-career but took the safer way instead, and kind of regret it. I’d love to hear from you again and find out the road you took.