Summer is my downtime.
In the past three years of life, my girls have spent the majority of their week in the months of June and July with their father in Columbus. Which means that I spend the majority of my week at home, reading, cleaning, and trying not to be bored. (I don’t find reading or cleaning boring. But this past weekend, I cleaned the entire house, part of the garage, and read two books and started a third.)
I’m an introvert and so I readily admit that I enjoy time spent alone. But the past three years I have discovered that I am an introvert who likes to talk. Rather a lot. It’s an adjustment. So, I place strict boundaries around my day, I crave my schedule, I recognize when I need to talk to my sister or my friends or the guy. Of course, just because I need to talk, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t insanely busy. So I do talk to myself quite a lot as well.
When the girls come home, life is busy and loud and full of all the talking. It is also much harder to transition that I ever would have imagined. When I put myself in their place, though, I understand-switching between houses and families and pets and rules and bedrooms and all the things-it’s a lot for a thirteen year old and a ten year old. I am grateful that they have each other-Felicity leans on Betsy and Betsy takes care of her sister.
And even though we all adore each other, and the girls are always so glad to get home to their rooms and their grandparents and life as we know it, it is also just tricky. The emotions of moving between their parents, even as we have done this for such a while now, I think is just bubbling under the surface. We nearly always get into an argument about the state of their bedrooms (I try so hard to remember that I used to have a messy room, but it’s difficult sometimes to even find a path through their rooms, and I fault myself for that, but at the same time I don’t want to spend my time picking up after them only to have them wreck it again). There are days that I miss that old Joy and her strict ways.
When life fell apart, the girls saw me fall to such a state that I could barely function. I think-I think that broke open something inside of me. I’m not making excuses for it. But I am laying out a truth in our life. I’m not that strict Mom that I used to be. I want to spend the time that I have with my girls making memories, watching old 80s television shows, eating macaroni and cheese and all of the kinds of potatoes, obsessing over The Brady Bunch and Spin and Marty and Annette Funicello and all of the things that I treasure and somehow got lucky enough to have girls as geeky as me who love these things too.
It’s a balancing act.
And the truth is, it’s a tougher transition than I expected when all of life changed. But I think that I have at the very least gotten to a place where I anticipate and expect the transition to be tricky, and I make room for us to have nothing planned so that we can just pile on my bed and watch Perfect Strangers and sometimes talk about things that happened while they were gone, and sometimes not, and just readjust.
One of the most amazing things about being forced to change all of life after a lifetime preparing for a quite different life is that you realize that you aren’t going to break, you will survive life falling apart, and there will come a time of after. Life will turn into all kinds of befores and afters. Grace, for me, just now, is the gift of change. Life in the transition may not always be exactly perfect, but it’s exactly where we need to be.
Honor the space between no longer and not yet.
-Nancy Levin
