Things change.
I wonder, with my 37th birthday looming, if it is a little late to learn this lesson. I am thinking it is.
As a child there are constants in your life. People. Places. Things even. There are traditions and cycles and schedules we depend on. This is where we always go for groceries. This is the bowl I always eat from. This is how my grandfather’s garden smells. This is where we go on summer vacation. This is what my mother always says. This is how it is.
I think as children, we fixate on these constants. In the first years after we arrive into our world, we experience extraordinary change. There is so much to learn and realize and grow up into. As our world moves and shudders under our feet, we steady ourselves with what is always there. What we know. If I walk into my home, my room will be up the stairs and straight ahead. The Cheerios are always kept in the cupboard over the stove. The house key is kept on a string inside the hall closet door. Always. And, as children, if we find our constants change even slightly, we panic.
My boys depend on routine. It is their religion. They move in their cycles, they are comforted by them. I joke about their OCD tendencies but completely understand them. What do you mean a fat man named Santa comes into my home once a year to deliver stuff? Are you sure thunder is perfectly ok even though it sounds like the world is exploding above my head? Wait, we’re floating on a planet in the middle of a wide unknown called space? *breathe* Mommy will have my favorite yogurt ready for lunch, we always drive this way to school and I get to stay up until 8:30pm on weekends. All is well.
But then there are life changing moments. You move. Your school changes. Your friends are far away. What was constant is no longer. A new normal is established. I understood these changes well as a child. And, because children do learn new things quickly while clutching onto remaining constants, I assimilated when needed.
Because there is always some familiarity somewhere. My grandfather’s garden still smelled the same, no matter how many years had passed before I stood in it again. My mother always said those same kinds of far too annoying but strangely comforting things. And decades later, that very same grocery store I shopped at as a child still exists – with the same graying employees smiling down at me in line.
Death does a fairly good job at ripping most constants (the constants that were always always there no matter how far or how often I moved) apart.
Voices that soothed and moved you through a new world are gone. The world’s they created, the homes they kept, the things they bought to fill them, the foods they made, the gardens they grew, the traditions they kept, the sayings they always said over and over again… that is immediately gone.
You can’t return.
You can’t hear the door creak the way it used to and slam behind you. You won’t find the Cheerios kept where they always were. You won’t hear the sounds of your mother – her certain clicking, scuffing pace down the hall. And, when you wake up far too late on a Saturday morning, you certainly won’t hear your grandmother singsong from the kitchen: “Good morning Merry sunshine, how did you wake so soon? You chased the little stars away and shined away the moon!”
It’s gone.
And that is how the world is.
Things fall apart.
Things change.
Nothing is constant.
And as adults, we regroup and reshape and recreate our families. We make new constants. We surround ourselves with new everydayness. The Cheerios find a new home in your pantry. And maybe you redo what they did. You recreate it subtly with every hope that the constant in some quiet, private comforting way remains.
I miss those people. I miss those places. I miss those things.
With a nostalgic, regretful, desperate ache rooted and wound into my gut – I. Miss. It.
Still. I have new people and new places and new things.
Apparently this is how life goes.
Things fall apart. Things change. But they renew again. And move forward.
Breathing and hoping.
But missing.
And eating Cheerios for breakfast every single morning.
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