Change is in the Air

Yesterday was an historic day for our country.  Everyone is hopeful, everyone is waiting, everyone is inspired.  Change is in the air.

I don’t want to talk about that kind of change, though.  It’s not that I don’t care because I do, very much so.  I just don’t talk about politics here.  Not today.

No, I want to talk about change on a more micro level than the macro changes going on all around us.  We get so caught up in the big worries of the day like rising unemployment and inconceivably high national debt that we either overlook or take for granted the smaller changes going on in our own worlds.  Changes that really aren’t small at all, they just get somehow eclipsed by thoughts of those things “bigger than us.”

There are big changes going on in my house.  Big, sometimes unseen and unheard changes that have ramifications you maybe didn’t think about before.  I knew it was coming, it’s not like I’m an ostrich with my head in the sand.  I’ve always known this day would come.  I just didn’t really think it would.  Because we’re different.  We’re special.  We’re a team.  Only we aren’t different and we’re not special, and we’re not a team anymore.

The Boy is growing up.  He’s going to graduate high school, come hell or high water, this June.  I am very proud of the person he’s become and the progress he’s made in wrapping his head around this thing called life.  He’s going to be a good person.  He still has a lot to learn, but then don’t we all.

Part of that growing up, though, is the inevitable and inescapable disassociation with the parental units.  In order to start flying on his own he has to push us away.  We have to make the shift in his mind from the people who take care of him to the people who are holding him back, so that he can make that break seem like the right thing to do.  It’s such a hard thing to jump out of the nest and learn to fly, and it seems that the only way teenagers can do it is for it to become imperative.

That process is so hard, for everyone.  I remember.  I remember feeling conflicted because I didn’t want to leave the security of my mother’s house, and yet at the same time feeling like she didn’t understand me and my needs at all.  I needed her but I didn’t want to need her and it made me be angry teenager.  I remember.

We’ve reached that stage in my house.  The Boy isn’t really a boy anymore, but he’s not quite a man yet either.  He’s making that break in his head, and we have gone from the people he likes to hang out with to the assholes that don’t understand him and make him do suckass chores and ruin his life.  He has shifted the center of his happiness from our house to his girlfriend’s house, so that now anything that prevents him from being in the center of his happiness is just too much to be borne.  It’s cause for anger and derision.

He’s very good about hiding his discontent most of the time, but you can’t really hide much of anything from those who know you best indefinitely.  Yet we are always compelled to try, aren’t we?  We always think that we’re different, we’re special.  Parents can’t possibly understand.  They can’t possibly relate.  Times are different now than back in the stone age when the parents grew up in happy Leave it to Beaver land (or in my case it was more like Sixteen Candles land).

But they’re not different.  Not in the ways that matter.  Technology may have changed, but basic human evolution takes much, much longer.  The things he’s going through now are no different than what we went through at his age.  They are no less monumental in his mind now than they were in mine back then.  Back when I was putting my mother through the same thing.

Except that we were supposed to be different.  Special.  A team.