I think someone came into my head and pulled out all my thoughts to write this article for BustedHalo! Caitlin Kennell Kim captures the hard part about the many transitions in youngadult hood, and she has some incredible reminders about how to find God in the transition. I needed to hear this big time as we prepare to move to Texas on July 28th. If I were to write a piece on moving, it would begin the same way as hers….I hate moving!
I hate moving. I have moved seven times since I graduated from college. This August, we are moving again. I am vexed. Terribly vexed.
I know that moving can be an adventure. I know that a change often does me good. But, to be perfectly honest, I am anxious. I didn’t realize just how anxious I was until a few weeks ago when our 4-year-old son (the oldest and the self-appointed spokesman/chieftain of the tribe of little ones that inhabit our house) stomped down the stairs into the living room with his arms folded across his chest and proclaimed with unadulterated sass that he is NOT moving to Ohio. This was followed by an emphatic “Hmmph!” as he threw his head to the side in an Oscar-worthy demonstration of defiant indignation. “Why?” I asked him. He stopped. He thought for a moment. “I’m shy of Ohio, mommy,” he said quietly, his eyes growing impossibly large and shiny as he did his best not cry, “I’ve never been there.” Well said.
When I was in college I used to tell myself that after graduation things would settle down and I would no longer be adrift in a sea of constant change and transition. After college when I was living in the worst apartment in the history of Western Civilization in a neighborhood that had all of the melancholic, gritty appeal of a Bruce Springsteen song (but smelly and dangerous and infinitely less romantic) and skipping meals to pay bills, I was sure that graduate school would be the time of relative peace. (Stop laughing.) During graduate school I was positive that getting married and starting a family naturally would usher in a period of domestic stability and quiet.We are always becoming
I have something to report back to you from the trenches of transition and disquiet that are young adulthood: this is life. There is no plateau of calm and stability on the horizon. It doesn’t exist. Life is change and transition and being uprooted again and again. Period. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.I have something to report back to you from the trenches of transition and disquiet that are young adulthood: this is life. There is no plateau of calm and stability on the horizon. It doesn’t exist. Life is change and transition and being uprooted again and again. Period. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
Becky Eldredge
July 19, 2012