Tag: stage of life

Changes: clarification

~ K ~ Leave a comment

My most recent post on changes wasn’t about my friend and her baby so much as it was about using a recent example to highlight my difficulty with change. Namely change in stages of life. I’m a writer but sometimes I don’t write things so well.

To continue with the thought though—at the risk of totally botching this up, I wonder how I’d handle the transition to having a child of my own. I’m not pregnant or anything but I think about having a tiny, little life of my own and I wonder how much more would I be near the epicenter of my own earthquake. I like the idea of kids but am not sure that I’d do so well with them in reality. And then that puts me in a stage of life far beyond my New York friends and if I’m honest, that’s the last thing I want to do because then I wonder if that would be the final break, the final straw in us not being able to relate to one another at all.

I read a quote somewhere, might have even been T. D. Jakes in Essence magazine but he said that some people come into your life for a season and when that season ends, God takes them away. It’s not that they’re bad or you’re bad, it’s just that the season is over and it’s time to part ways.

Thinking about that always made me sad because I lament the loss of friendships all the time.

I feel sad that I never kept in touch with Tara, my best friend in kindergarten. I feel sad that a girl I once considered my best friend in elementary school decided to betray me by kissing the boy I’d hopelessly become infatuated with and prank calling me to tell me I was a lesbian. (*69 was a Godsend at the time.) I also feel sad that i lost touch with a girl who was an amazing friend and no-nonsense in my freshman year of high school. And how many more friendships have I lost or missed out on through my college years? Too numerous to count.

I suppose I’m focusing on the relational aspect of change. But I don’t do so well with moving away from places outside of New York although I’m doing all right just outside Philly in Pennsylvania. Since I’m typing this on my iTouch, I’ll leave the subject as it stands now and maybe elaborate on this post with different aspects of my life in which I have trouble adapting to change.

Leaving New York was really a BIG one. But NY became an idol so there’s more to the story.

Turn and face the strain: changes

~ K ~ 9 Comments

I don’t deal with change so well. I don’t deal with hope so well either so we’ll leave any discussions of Obama’s marketing slogan for the 2008 presidential election for another day.

Change is hard for me. My husband’s most frequent comment to me is that I live in the past. He’s right; I’ll readily acknowledge that I do. Especially for someone who insists on planning for the future.

When it comes to friendships, change is especially hard for me. The changes that occurred in my friendship after I made the transition from being a single woman to a married woman were difficult. My friends were no longer first in my life; my husband now was—and that’s how it had to be from that point on.

This grieved me incredibly. I’m sure it grieved them more. Not only did I get married but I left New York state soon after to move hundreds of miles away to Kentucky. They probably felt as though I’d left them behind. And I must acknowledge that I did.

Now, I have a close friend who has just given birth to a beautiful baby girl. I am happy for her. But as I visited her and her husband today, their main attentions centered around this tiny, helpless life who needed care and attentiveness. It was then that I experienced what my single friends must have felt when I got married: I felt left behind.

My friend and her husband have moved into a new stage of life that includes a child. And today, I felt the sudden shift in our friendship like Californians feel the shift of the earth underneath. We initially became friends at church because we were one of the few young married couples who were still childless. Not that it was a stage of life my friend particularly wanted or liked but it was where she was and it was where I was and it was one of the reasons we were able to become good friends.

I have lots of friends who have children but I suppose I’ve always had a hard time relating to them because they’re moms and I’m not and I hate bugging them because their children are their first priorities. And I’ve never seen this particular friend that way but with her new daughter, that’s where our friendship is headed. And I’m sad and I grieve a bit because even though we’ll still be friends, our friendship will never be the same.

My heart now sincerely goes out to my single friends who lost me to a husband. I understand how they feel now.