Take care of me

In the news this past week were three stories concerning young life and death. The 24 year-old from a neighboring town who died during his pre-dawn commute when he drove into a tree to avoid hitting an already dead bear. The 23 year-old graduate student in Boston who vanished and was pulled from a river seven days later. The UNH sophomore who went missing a week ago and was confirmed dead over the weekend.

No doubt, the vicarious grief I feel over stories like these has some connection to having just seen the last of our four children to the threshold of "out there." Past a point that I want to, I can imagine the grief of a family who survives a young member. In the same vicarious way, I grieve to think of what will become of them every year when the leaves fly.

It's not often that I text my children with a gentle but urgent plea to contact me immediately and assure me of their well being, but that is what I did last week:

 Please, take care of yourself.

In minutes, I heard back:

"I'm fine."

"I'm okay."

"Don't worry."

In stark juxtaposition, over the same seven day period, but closer to the bottom of the page, where sad but usual parents-in-custody stories appear, were tales of punitive behaviors that ranged from stupid to unfathomable. Stories which bring out my very efficient idea of justice, but which then linger in my conscience as I consider what will become of a child, whose biggest job on the planet is not to learn to tell time or tie her shoes, but survive her own parents. I have never seen the children who don't. But I have seen the children who do.

There is not a greater, more preventable, more wasteful and contemptuous act than to fail a child.

They don't arrive without an invitation. They don't crash the party, we bring them here. And not gently. Quite literally, we push them into our world from an inner world of sure and greater comfort.

It's no bargain. We owe them a lot for making the trip. Comfort, love, guidance, shelter, food and clothing. And yet once here, they ask for one thing and one thing only, and it is as free as the air we breathe:

Take care of me.

But you see it, the failing in progress:

Angry adults,  who stalk through life and give off vibes of regret like heat waves, while their children hop and hum and behind them and wait for the climate above their heads to change... Shallow, self-absorbed parents who are more interested in being liked than mastering the hard and tiring work of saying no, of refusing unearned possessions, of turning off the television, of putting themselves second, third or last - all  things that make us very unpopular, very often, for a very long time... Substance-addicted parents who lack the awareness to rein in their children, until they abdicate the task altogether and leave them to raise themselves. And, as sad as any, the parents who believe it is beyond their control to get between an immature, defiant teenager and their decision to fail themselves by dropping out of school.

You see these failed children. They act too old, they act too sexual, they lack empathy and they hide their vulnerability with a too-tough swagger. They need love, they don't trust it, and they cope with the challenge of raising themselves by imitating older people they aren't ready to be yet.

Take care of me.

This outer world that we bring our children too,  as big as it is, as disorganized and massive as it will always be, begs to be explored. Adapting to such a place for a young child is a constant work in progress. Things happen that don't make sense. People behave in ways that are confusing. Values and rules contradict each other. They act out, reject us, and push back. They exhaust us and fight - hard - for the freedom to make bad decisions. And yet, as complicated as this adaptation is, as overwhelming as the outer world is, it is less confusing than the inner one.

When they are at their most unlikable, what they need to know we will do, even as they tempt us to give up, is steadfastly refuse to fail them.

On Saturday night, at dinner with our two grown children, I watched two couples, late thirties or so, who had taken their very young children with them to dinner. They laughed and talked, relaxed in the company of each other. While one man talked to his friend, the child to his left quietly sketched out images on an erasable tablet, then erased and started over, finally presenting the work to his dad who turned in his seat to face him.  "What have you got there?" For the next full minute or two, they traded images, the child's a scribble, the father's an image of letters spelling out "HENRY."  

The woman seated across from them behaved similarly, pausing the conversation with her friend to turn the pages of her child's picture book until they reached one that was special. I watched each adult give the child maybe only a minute or two of their full attention, enough to let them know they hadn't been forgotten. I could picture these parents with their children years from now, maybe at dinner the way we were; one expressing a thought, the other one listening, both attuned.  

Rare is the child who is born without the capacity to thrive in response to being cared for. In ways that require no words,  involve simple action, cost nothing, require no advanced education, we tell our children every day what they can expect from us. It should be one thing: 

I will take care of you.

The way it really should be

Even I had to refill my water and take a snack break while I re-read this post.

But bear with me, because this is about marriage and there is a lot to say about that, if, like me, you've been married since Madonna first crawled around on a stage in fishnet stockings and messy hair.

In the seventies, Carly Simon produced a song called, "That's the Way I've Always Heard it Should Be" about a woman (actually about Carly) who is contemplating marriage (probably to James Taylor) but worries that she'll wind up like her father, smoking in the dark living room, or her mother, reading magazines alone in bed, or her friends from college (they're all married now) who are clinging and clawing and drowning  in love's debris. Like these people. 

She likens marriage to being caged on James Taylor's shelf. And yet, in the end she wraps up with this:

You want to marry. We'll marry.

Even as a kinda dumb and kinda smart teenager, I was puzzled by this.

Next March, I will have been married for twenty-eight years. I am thinking about marriage today for a few reasons:

Football Gus

First, our children are gone. We have time to nurture our communication now, and fill in the divets.  We notice each other again. We know each other again. If we remember the history we don't want to repeat, we cherish the history that has kept us together. We love more of the same things than we realized, and we have a kitten that we talk to like we talked to Courtney when she was small enough to be held like a football.

I also know that as resilient and enduring as our marriage turned out to be, it wasn't free. We've been challenged by different parenting styles, separation, and differences in opinion over everything from how to keep a house clean (answer: hire a housekeeper) to how to spend money (answer: take control of the finances and when the subject of money comes up, point at the window and say, "What the hell was that?").  Distance is inevitable and so is the fact that one will address it first and possibly have to describe/explain it to the other who doesn't want to talk about it. It can be lonely at the front, and there will always be someone who (in your imagination, where you are mesmerizing) would respect you more. There will always be someone who, (in his imagination where he is mesmerizing) would appreciate him more. There are indeed, silent noons, tearful nights and angry dawns, no matter how much you drink and laugh, close the wound and hide the scars.

Second, football baby Courtney will be married next year and will begin a journey over and around roads I've already traveled; the nice, just-paved ones, and the ones with detours all over the place, manned by cranky workers who tell you to slow the hell down at one end, and speed the hell up at the other. 

I can talk about some of those construction sites.

First, a disclaimer: I can't speak for men, so I'll speak for myself and possibly many other women. Second, two observations: one is that  men are thoughtless, and unkind and stupid sometimes. The other is that women are thoughtless and unkind and stupid sometimes.

We project. Disagreements escalate fast and become ferocious when one, and not the other, is grappling with a larger worry at the core; usually something to do with respect or intelligence or power. Self-respecting, intelligent women who have opted to stay home and raise children for example, are not really fighting over who left the garage door open so that all the leaves could blow in, and they don't really care who notices, but ignores the full trash can. They do care - a lot -  about disappearing.

We fight to keep, and fight hardest when we think we're losing, respect for how we think. Strangely, I didn't struggle with self-respect issues when I was driving the kids to school in a bathrobe and sunglasses.  But I did struggle - a lot - when I was sure my husband believed, as I did, that I was withering intellectually. Today, of course, I know that if I lost my mind, Larry would miss it too.

We worry about losing who we were, sure. But we worry - a lot - about who we still are and could be.  Powerful still? Beautiful? Compelling? I can say, with all my  heart, that anyone I know who has stayed married past twenty years, unless they have been impersonating whole, thinking people, has had to figure this out: how to grow in the marriage and still be, in some way, the person they always were.  

 Courtney, with her
self-concept
 and every-cat Daisy

Before I understood the sum-of-the-parts Gestalt of relationships, I wondered how it was possible to compromise, and negotiate, and give in, and sacrifice and take the high road and not feel you'd traveled too far from the home base to ever return? Today, I understand that one brings the self concept into a marriage they way they bring the cat they adopted before there was even a first date with James Taylor. It's easier to  keep and nurture self-concept than it is to go looking for it once it's slipped out through the door that James Taylor left open. (Maybe if Carly's friends from college had saved room in their lives for themselves, they wouldn't have been crowded out by their children who only wound up hating them for what they weren't.)

What a downer song.

But sometime in the eighties, Carly Simon produced another song called "Coming Around Again" . It's about a woman who is struggling with the demands of marriage and love and children. The lyrics are so romantic but also, so bewildering - there is the breaking of windows and the burning of soufflés and the (creepy) screaming of lullabyes - but the tone is hopeful and  in the end she wraps up with this:

But what else can I do? I'm so in love with you.

The lovely thing about time is that it doesn't leave you behind, it brings you with it. Things get easier. You stop delegating the responsibility for your happiness and put it back in your own hands where it belongs. You stop asking your spouse to change into you so that you can get along. You're stunned to realize that if he's done a million things to bug you, he hasn't - ever - asked you to be someone else.

Finally, one day, you'll go for Mimosas and Christmas Tree shopping and you'll be making wry jokes about things that were not always funny. It will strike you that the things you don't like about each other are no longer grounds, but forgettable details. And what you do like about each other will seem familiar and precious because it is. It's the all-grown-up version of what made you fall in love and marry in the first place.

Happily, the only things Courtney and John have in common with Carly and James are their initials. Should they ever see themselves in one of Carly's songs, they will need to have faith, that as Carly discovered, although probably not with James Taylor, if they're willing to play the game, it will come around again. I know. 

Erma Bombeck, blog-sitter

The following piece was written by Erma Bombeck, a queen among everyday people who knew more about living and parenting through humor than anyone I've read since she left us in the late nineties.

I think every mother I know has come across this timeless gem, "I Loved You Enough."  But I read it as a teenager and never forgot it.  And, if every near-adult child had a parent who was this much of a nuisance in their life, well...they'd be grateful someday.

Since I write now and then about parent relationships with grown children, it seemed a good placeholder while I finish taking care of non-bloggy business for the next couple of days. 

I Loved You Enough

Someday, when my children are old enough to understand the logic that motivates a mother, I'll tell them:

          

I loved you enough to bug you about where you were going, with whom, and what time you would get home.

         

I loved you enough to be silent and let you discover your hand-picked friend was a creep.

I loved you enough to make you return a Milky Way with a bite out of it to a drugstore and confess,  "I stole this."

I loved you enough to stand over you for two hours while you cleaned your bedroom, a job that would have taken me 15 minutes.

         

I loved you enough to not make excuses for your lack of respect or your bad manners.

I loved you enough to ignore  "what every other mother"  did.

I loved you enough to figure you would lie about the party being chaperoned but forgive you for it....after discovering I was right.

I loved you enough to let you stumble, fall and fail so that you could learn to stand alone.

I loved you enough to accept you for who you are, not what I wanted you to be.

But most of all, I loved you enough to say no when you hated me for it.   That was the hardest part of all. 
 

                                                   ~ Erma Bombeck

Dwell

"Life is so unnerving, for a servant who's not serving. You're not whole without a soul to wait upon..."

---Lumiere, of Beauty and the Beast, singing about  Empty Castle Syndrome

There's an expression in baseball, meant to urge on the batter: "You've seen it now." 

I thought about it, and I'm going to post about Empty Nest again. I've seen it now. It's bigger than I am, this transition, and so I'm pretty sure it's big for other people too, and at this point in my Personal Life Transition (formerly known as Empty Nest), it's best to share.

There are several things worth mentioning about the Personal Life Transition and this post will be about not ignoring them. This post will be about respecting your inner crybaby. Frankly, this post will be one I'd read myself if I weren't writing it.  

Last night I had dinner with a friend who will soon face daily life without children at home, as I did a month ago. We discussed this transition for a while. How empty nest begins with missing the children, but then quickly, at around the time when you're telling everyone how well you're doing, (go over there and click on a "A Friend in Time" and you'll see what I mean)  becomes a Personal Life Transition. With each passing day, it has less to do with the child who has left, and more to do with you, who have stayed behind watching a YouTube of Alan Jackson singing "Remember When" even though you know you  hate lack an appreciation for Country music.

Some of  us, if we're being honest, own up to the feelings of loss and disorientation that come with this transition. We see each other at the grocery store and obscure traffic by the broccoli stand talking about it.  We go out for dinner and share  sad/happy then/now stories. We post comments to each other on Facebook.  Others, the ones who are tough-loving themselves through it, consider it self-indulgent and self-fulfilling to dwell on this passage.

I say, dwell.

This is more than a passage. This is one big-ass transition.

It's not just because there are multiple parts to it (the summer-long goodbye, the shopping/packing, the remember when-ing, the wistful gazing, the clean house, the quiet TV room, the tidy bathroom) it's also because it isn't quick. For weeks after the last child leaves, there are aftershocks that can be felt, even if, by then, there is not a stray sock or empty coke can or overflowing trash basket in sight.

From what I observe, I'm about a third of the way through. I've shored up the social calendar, planned some travel, picked up my writing life, and considered where I'll put my altruistic self a few hours each week as a volunteer.

The harder part is addressing the unfamiliar feel of familiar life. You can get up at the same time, leave the house at the same time, do the same daily stuff you always do, but there is a strange, counter-intuitive feel to no longer planning your life around the habits of someone else, even if subconsciously. There is a confusing feel to parenting, too, which remains who you are, but becomes less what you do. And, while I grew used to our son's absence quickly, I am still wondering how to replace the playful spirit in the house that made me take myself a little less seriously each day. I'm still working on the unfamiliar feel of that one.

It's tempting to compare this search for new footing to walking across a frozen pond in sneakers without falling down, but even I think that's a stretch.  It's much more like  roller skating through a dark room without bumping into the furniture. Yes, that's it. That's what it's like.

I'm not quite there yet, in the new life. I'm not unhappy but I'm not serene. With complete freedom, I've become undisciplined; starting projects I don't finish, rushing to be on time for everything,  bouncing from spot to spot looking for the writing location that grounds me every day. But... if I shake my head to think of how well my day ran back when I ran a family,  it's occurred to me more than once that each of those days was framed - from beginning to end  - by the habits of others. 

When I meet them, I am positive my new habits and I will hit it off.

Alan Jackson, who
 Remembers When

So take heart, fellow Personal Life Transitioners. However you do it, whether you roll, slide, stumble or leap to the other side, you will land in a place that has been waiting for you,  is what Alan Jackson and I believe. Look what happened to Belle.

In the meantime, dwell. 

For a short time, shelve the fact that there are bigger problems than having a completely free schedule and  a child who was ambitious and lucky enough to make it into college. Appreciate that the exit of the last child has the same potential to take your life in a new direction as the arrival of the first. As therapists suggest, "embrace" the transition for the real and unique life event that it is. Find it interesting. As you would not want to be crushed by an elephant walking through the yard, you wouldn't want to run away and miss something so mighty and powerful up close either. Same thing.

Like all things, it is right now, and then it will be gone. What won't be gone, for a little while anyway, is the song "Be Our Guest" which I put in your head on purpose to make you happy.

Dwell.

Pet peevish

Right after I finished the post I wrote for this space,  I decided to submit it as an article. Good for me, but blog-wise it left me empty-handed, so this will be a cereal-for-dinner kind of post. Not especially compelling, but not about empty nest again either.

Today, I had to choose between: The man who flirted with me in traffic recently (and how long it took for me to realize he wasn't trying to alert me to a problem with my car), or pet peeves.  I'm still a little embarrassed by the man-in-traffic story, so I'll go with pet peeves.

I'll  put these in order of their potential to be irritating.  Peeve number 1, for example, has the power to change my mood, whereas number 4 barely qualifies as a peeve at all and is actually a little amusing when it occurs. Feel free to comment about your own pet peeve.  It means you're a nice person. Negative people are  peeved by too many things to have pets.

Herewith:

1.Unruly, unsupervised children in expensive restaurants.

I will initiate a round of peek-a-boo with a stranger's child who is on the verge of a meltdown if the parent is trying, too.  But in a nice restaurant, where I've paid extra to avoid unruly children, and where the parent is not trying,  it's a mood buster. I once watched an upscale child of upscale people slide off his seat and travel from table to table banging a spoon and bowl together. The mother looked at the other diners and smiled. "Look," she said. "He's thinks he's playing in a band."  This should happen more rarely than it does.

2. People who observe the no smoking rule in public places by stepping outside to light up, twelve inches from the entrance.

Atrociously parked car

3. People who park atrociously and at enough of an angle to encroach on the space of others on the left or right.  

Oh wait, that's me. I do that. 

4.  Phrase abuse.   It's tiring  to think about  how often and  in what situations the phrases "It Takes a Village" and "Perfect Storm" and even "Schizophrenic"  have been misused/misquoted/misapplied/misunderstood .

a) Yes, it takes support and resources and responsible parenting to raise a child. But the whole village to make the child do homework, go to bed, find a summer job and stop texting during dinner?  The whole village? Many people I respect use this expression, but it's still almost-irritating.

b) It is a perfect storm when a situation is aggravated drastically by an exceptionally rare combination of circumstances, or if it is a movie starring George Clooney. It is not a perfect storm if it starts to rain on the way to work, in a traffic jam, on a day when your alarm didn't go off.

c) While I have heard forecasters characterize it this way, the weather  is not schizophrenic because it changes abruptly. The weather is schizophrenic if it manifests itself with auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or is disorganized in its speech and thinking. 

5.  Word abuse, to wit: "surreal" and "ironic" and "empathetic."

a)  Surreal does not mean amazing or surprising or unexpected. It means to have the disorienting, hallucinatory qualities of a dream.

Example:  If you see someone walking down the street who looks like Johnny Depp, that  is not surreal.  If you are walking down the street and an image of Johnny Depp floats before your eyes, that is surreal.

b)  Ironic also does not  mean amazing, or surprising, or unexpected. Ironic refers to the incongruency of simultaneous events.  Or, things that are paradoxically true.

Example:  If someone says to someone else that they saw a person walking down the street who looks like Johnny Depp and the someone recalls that they recently read an article about Johnny Depp in People magazine, that is not ironic. If a person thinks they see someone who looks like Johnny Depp across the street, and heads over for a better look, and is run over by Johnny Depp himself, that is ironic.

c)  The word "empathetic" crashed the dictionary party, it was not invited. It was misused by so many, so often and  in so many contexts the Webster people finally got frustrated enough to deem its useage acceptable. The correct word is empathic.

Example:  If Johnny Depp  is questioned by the police and is charged with negligent driving after running you over and is clearly humiliated, and you can relate because of the humiliating time the police came to question you about all of your outstanding parking tickets (which were mostly paid) what you are feeling is empathic, not empathetic.

That's it, that concludes the post about pet peeves.  Next week, I'll talk about the guy in traffic.  

And what is the topic of the piece I'll submit as an article? Empty Nest, of course. There are a few things I forgot to say about that. If I put it in the blog though, it will start to sag on one side.

The dinner party vote

Every four years, the presidential election season rolls in like fog and I become anxious. It is the same anxiety I felt in school when there were not three months before the final exam, but three weeks, and I realized I had to stop fooling around and pay attention if I still wanted to have friends worth knowing.

I'm going to go off topic for a moment to say that one of the most kick-ass things about being in your 50's is that you no longer need to prove you're mentally compelling.  If the words "Romney" or "Obama" never come up over a two hour lunch with your best friends, you can still feel brilliant in their company.   

Anyway. 

As a rule,  I host or attend enough dinner parties with intelligent people to know that if I can't discuss what-all has happened in politics since 1788 , I should at least be able to toss a sound-bite grenade over my shoulder as I clear between entree and dessert. I also know I must have at least one person present who feels the country is falling apart, and one (preferably their spouse) who feels the people who live here are falling apart, and hopefully another who drives this chicken-egg debate into the ground. Like this:

Liberal:  You think the country's in big trouble now? Wait until Planned Parenthood gets wiped out.

Conservative:  Planned Parenthood will never be wiped out. It just won't be funded with my tax dollars anymore.  

Me:  "Who wants dessert? Also, who thinks it's true that Obama wants to gut welfare reform?"

I've observed that  while many people are politically savvy,  some are just  politically emotional and like to take a shot at someone who is being bombastic. But eventually, someone, tired of the exchange, will wander into the kitchen to talk about the school official who got charged over the weekend with assault and battery, while the others debate whether or not Mitt Romney really does eat middle class citizens for breakfast.

My kind of dinner party.

Still, I know what I know, but not what I don't, and because I don't respect headline mentality, I owe it to myself to stay in the loop in a left-brain way, to dig  into those headlines a little, visit a few fact-checking sites, read the editorials in respected (if super-biased) publications, listen to my heart, feel my feelings, be who I am,  trust in the power of me, and turn my frown upside down. I make it a game. No shopping at Hannaford for appetizer ingredients until I've read something in the Boston Globe that does not flatter Obama.  

But there's more. Now that our youngest child is able to vote, I owe it to him to insist passionately that he do that:  take a stand and, if only in his own heart, if it is never even vocalized, believe passionately about something bigger than his own concerns enough to represent it with his vote.  In other words, care. 

And, there's more. I owe it to my husband who isn't just in the loop, all of the time, about all-things political, with every fiber of his being, but lives in the loop with his blanket and pillow and thermos  during the political season. I believe he's taught  himself to leave the room if we veer toward politics before he can feel his own feelings about my lack of attunement. Thankfully, even if  God made him a politically tenacious dog and me a politically distracted cat, God also made me a quick study with good research skills.

So all things considered, this year I realize I have to adjust my own mask before assisting others. This year,  I need to make an example of myself. To that end, I will endeavor to stop fooling around and pay attention.

Perhaps I'll don my goalie mask at breakfast and start with this:

It's not true that Obama is gutting welfare reform and intending to "hand everyone a check even if they don't work."  Under the new policy, states can now seek a federal waiver from rigid "work-participation" rules which would allow welfare recipients to engage in “work activities" instead. This could mean college or other training so that career options for an undereducated family breadwinner are no longer limited to a couple of minimum wage jobs.  (Factcheck.org, don't make me sorry for believing this.  Don't let it turn out that one hour of work activities can mean circling job openings in the paper before doing the Jumble puzzle for twenty minutes. Don't let it be true that work activities logged are like, say, driving miles that are logged by a student  in Driver's Ed.)

I'll roam the articles and I'll  keep at it, because already, the summer is over and it's almost October. Election day's a comin, and happily, so is my favorite time of year to host one of those contentious dinner parties.

A friend in time

Drop-off day everywhere

At this point last week, we were preparing to fly Sam to his Elon drop-off. 

Today,  I'm looking back on that drop off; the parking lot introductions to other parents, the move-in teams with their maroon t-shirts imprinted with "You bELONg here",  the trips and return trips and final trips to Target for trash can liners, Clorox wipes,  power strips and hampers. The "Goodbye," or,  in my case, the  "I love you. Thank you. And behave." The trip back home, the cliche-quiet inside the cliche-empty nest.

I fed the cat, unpacked, went through the mail and logged on to Facebook.

"What now?" posted a parent-friend of mine.

Whether you've launched the first child and don't know what to expect or like we have, launched the last child and look forward to the full-length, uninterrupted conversations of olde with your spouse, that big question of "what now" hangs like fog beyond the headlights. Inside it are little murkier ones: questions of new identities, roles, validation, and purpose. Interestingly, they parallel the very questions our brand new college students will come to ponder, as soon as they get over the fact that NOBODY cares what time they come in, what they eat, or how often they launder their clothes.

I wanted to write back to my parent-friend, "Clean his room, lol!" but a two-word post like "What now?" is too poignant for a glib response like that, so I considered the more banal, "It's a new education for us too," or, "Join a club! Take a class! Run for office!" Finally,I decided that whatever I said would not be helpful, and would probably be insensitive.

"Never miss an opportunity to shut up," is some of the best advice I've heard. As a drop-off veteran, those opportunities are everywhere right now.

Except that I want to help.

And I want to help because I didn't ease gently onto this little path - I was shoved from behind when our two oldest left for college at the same time.

I recall how lost and fragile and weepy I was over my own two-word plight of "what now" and how I struggled for new normalcy until finally, in the middle of a conversation with my best friend about whether to make scrambled eggs with water or milk I broke down. "Every single day, I loved them and every single day it showed in the people they are," I sobbed.  "Where will I put all of that now?" My very startled friend was silent. "I mean, you know, so it shows?" I clarified.  Her next reaction, while not technically helpful, turned me around just the same.

"Oh my God. It is freaking me out right now to see you this upset."

It  made me think of how dogs are when their owners cry or get upset or gasp or show fright. They prance and whimper and pace in little circles because they know they can't say anything useful. They just hope with their entire being that you will go back to reading the paper or making a sandwich or having a glass of wine or whatever you have to do to calm the hell down. This visual made me laugh, which made me feel better. In the days that followed, the urgency of  "what now" waned and the comfort of easier routines - all the result of lighter days and fewer worries -  eclipsed my anxiety altogether.

Time simply passed.

Whether we're parents wondering where to put our parent-love now so it shows, or college students meandering through small talk with strangers, wondering who will be their next best friend, in only weeks from now, maybe in only days, we will know. We  have already begun to churn the unfamiliar into the familiar, we will soon allow new relationships to show their potential, and the question of "what now" will have been left behind.  

It is a certainty.

But it doesn't happen because we wish it would.

It happens in time.

Let time pass.

And as noted by Coldplay's  Chris Martin, be happy with what lies ahead as you discover, "just who you were."