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Don Quixote, his lance a little worse for the wear.
I was a twenty-year-old English/Spanish major taking classes in the study abroad program at the University of Valencia. All my courses were taught in Spanish—or castellano as the Valencianos called it. Of course, the professors spoke slower for all of us non-native speakers, but everything we read, wrote, and heard for our courses happened in Spanish.
As a literature student, I naturally gravitated toward Spanish literature courses. And, when in Spain? You’ve got to study Cervantes and his Don Quixote (Quijote). Oh, we learned much more about Cervantes than the tales of his man from La Mancha, but it was the Don himself who taught me the meaning of life.
You see, I had been on the archetypal youthful quest to discover the meaning of life for a few years now. I was Christian, but what did that mean about the meaning of life?
One day, right in Profesor Villalba’s class, I just knew. Oh, sure a beam of sunlight didn’t appear from nowhere and shine upon the notes I was taking. In fact, I think the day was one of the few really rainy and cloudy days I experienced during my stay in Valencia. Still, somehow I realized that the real meaning of life was the search. That if you thought you’d found all the answers—or stopped looking for them—then you were as good as dead, just like the Don. No more journey, no more purpose, no more life.
Don Quixote, dust and all.
But beyond that, I love that the Don sees the best in people, believes they are more than they are. Don’t you think that kind of belief is powerful enough to help people become more than they have been? I do—and I like to think that it’s just that kind of quixotic thinking our world needs more of now. By helping others see the possible in themselves, we make the impossible dream possible.
Of course, I get a little sappy when I start talking about this, but, hey, I’m still in love. Even after all these years, even though all my own dreams haven’t come true, I still believe in the search.
P.S. Even three very rough years after this blog post, I still believe . . .
(c) 1992 Sherman Lambert
Well, I still thought pursuing the right timing was important for causing the least amount of disruption in my workplace. That’s when I started charting my cycles and noticing that some patterns didn’t seem right. While driving to work, I’d hear Bonnie Raitt singing “Baby Mine” on the radio, but I’d begun to wonder if there would be a baby mine.
Just under a year after the first time—with some additional help from the doctors—we’d merged back onto the road to parenthood. However, I’d stopped worrying about disrupting work—I was starting to understand that babies are disruptive—no matter what! But, we still experienced problems—which led to our discovering early on that I was carrying twins. I prayed at least one baby mine would make it. Through medical interventions, my focused behaviors, and the grace of God, those babies mine did arrive, just a little early but so healthy we only got to stay in the hospital one day.
Turns out that amateur who read my palm before I ever met my kids’ father had been right about a couple things: I did have twins and each was strong-willed, even if they weren’t both boys.
When your only two kids are twins, each developmental phase is new to you no matter what. If you are also blessed with strong-willed kids who also have ADD, you soon learn that helping to guide their individual development can be exhausting even as you love them. Add in advocating to schools and medical professionals and somehow life becomes so much more complicated than you ever expected.
Now those babies mine are legally adults in many ways—I can’t access their educational or medical records on my own—but they are learning about many of the difficulties associated with life after high school. The world doesn’t really care that kids with ADD are supposed to take longer to figure out how to manage many everyday daily tasks. In fact, the world doesn’t really care that science is showing that even the brains of people without ADD don’t really finish developing until they reach their mid-20s.
My son doesn’t know what exactly he wants, but he seems to be floating on, finding happy moments in each day. For him I worry that he doesn’t worry enough about figuring out how to find a place in this world. If college isn’t his thing now, what is?
And, my daughter—well, I mourn the happy-go-lucky child who brought sunshine into my life. I glimpse her and then she slides back into her worries and sadness. I’ve searched for solutions for her, but in the end that quest isn’t mine.
So we’ve reached the point when I can guide them to resources, but can’t make them access them. What a hard place along the parenting journey . . .
(c) 2010 Sherman Lambert
Though I don’t know the grand plans for them, Someone else does.
(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert
Which is why it’s a blessing to have our kids away at college right now during this high-pressure week. Except . . . our daughter had to come home smack dab in the middle of (well, really at the beginning of) finals week to have a medical exam, too. Yes, timing is everything, but nothing we could say could convince the doctors’ practice that their scheduling was about as bad as it could get for a college student.
So instead of waiting another month to get on the road to healing, Christiana agreed to ramp up her stress during finals week. The university worked to coordinate a new exam schedule for her—not like the original plan for finals at 11:00 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. the first day followed by exams the next day at 7:30 a.m., 9:40 a.m., and 2:00 p.m. made any sense in the first place. Yikes.
On the last day of the semester she put to bed one final and has already received the good news that all went well—no given considering how badly the professor’s teaching and testing styles mismatched with Christiana’s learning and testing styles. This afternoon she takes one test and tomorrow morning she finishes with two others.
But first she had to turn in and be critiqued on her final art project today. Yes, she’s an incredibly talented artist, but not only does she set very high standards for herself, but also she has a teensy bit of a problem with jumping into a project before she’s absorbed all of the instructions.
Combine those approaches with her having a cold while coming home for 42 hours for a very ill-timed trip to do an uncomfortable test and you have a very stressed-out cranky art student—who is likely not going to find my observations very funny right now, but maybe she will change her mind after she recovers from this week. Maybe . . .
To complete studies in any areas of academic concentration often requires most of us to take a few courses that do not reflect our passions. Christiana can draw realistically, but she prefers a freer rein for her imagination. Usually, you can’t ride that particular horse in figure drawing class. She was just excited that this final project, for once, allowed a little fantasy: drawing an animal’s head on top of a human’s body.
The problem? The human body needed to be unclothed, just as in all the other assignments. She had a couple choices: she could either go to an optional class session where a model would be provided or she could find her own model. Snicker, right? But would our artist take the easy out? No, because then her work would be too similar to the other classmates’ work. Yes, sometimes her pursuit for artistic uniqueness puts her in challenging situations.
Let’s just say she got a certain nameless person to pose partially clad—and figured she’d just imagine the rest since she’d been drawing nudes all semester—except a lot depends on the angle you’re observing.
After staring at her reference textbook and only coming up with one realistic-looking side for the animal/woman, she was about to give up. No, she wasn’t ready to allow any more real-life models to help out, especially a certain (cringe-worthy) close relative. So I ran back and forth to the mirror several times, observed what I could, and then came back to describe and/or critique her version. Good thing I am a wordsmith!
Yes, I think she may have pulled it off, or at least as well as she could at that point. Oh, this kind of stress did not add to her pre-procedure mood, but thank goodness the procedure meds improved her attitude considerably, at least for an hour or so post-op.
Several hours after her medical procedure, she finished the other details for the project, applied the fixative, and put away the animal/woman.
That’s all the finals-related stress I needed. Thank goodness the doctors got the medical pictures they needed and she finished her drawing in time to rest overnight—before heading back to the insanity that is finals week.
When it comes down to semester’s end preparations, sometimes you just have to throw out a few educated guesses and hope that the details you fill in yourself are close enough to picture-perfect.
(c) 2011 Christiana Lambert
Cheyenne, moving day, 10/3/11
Living with people can be tricky, but for someone with depression, staying with a bad match-up is too risky to continue for very long.
Luckily, Christiana found a house with space as well as house-mates happy to welcome her at the same time she was able to get released from the original lease. Lower rent, closer to campus, and away from constant hostility. That sounds like moving on up, no matter how you look at it.
Open Door, Moving Day 2011
Saturday morning Sherman and I drove up north an hour or so where we met up with the girls—as well as with Cheyenne’s family’s minivan. We four worked hard to pack both our vehicles full so there wouldn’t be too many reasons to return. It was just way past time to get on down the road—which was really up the road since we headed north when Christiana, riding her red and white Schwinn scooter, led our little convoy across campus.
Up a narrow Victorian stairway we carried her boxes until there were no more. Unlike the barren walls in the old space, this house’s walls are covered with posters and post-it messages in a manner very familiar to us—Christiana never met a bare wall she couldn’t improve with her works and words as well as those of others. Surrounded by her boxes, she stood up and started claiming her own walls, picture by picture, until anyone who knew her would have known the room belonged to her.
So much easier to discover your way on a new campus while living in a welcoming environment—knowing she’s found a home, sweet home, makes our home every bit as sweet.
(c) 2011 Christiana Lambert
Major depression, however, seems closer to not believing in that someday.
And as much as I don’t know what that’s like for me, I do know what it sounds like in my daughter. When someone you love has fallen into the abyss of major depression, you just can’t give them platitudes such as “just deal with it” or let them experience every natural consequence of their actions.
To each person who tells me to relax and let her get herself through this blue period, there is this gut response that tells me we can’t afford to see if that will work—the potential cost is just too high—and Sherman agrees.
Until we’d walked with her on this path before, I would have thought they—especially the experts—were right.
This time she didn’t cry for help as early. You see, she’s older and wiser, which may actually mean she is deeper into depression this bout because of the coping skills she has gained over the past few years.
So why, during this period in her life, is this the semester she is studying The Bell Jar? What is purely literary or a treatise on various aspects of society in a time and place long past becomes something more to those who identify too well with the narrator’s thoughts. I’m an English major, for goodness’ sake, but this book has long since moved from the academic to the personal for me—and I still don’t really “get” what Plath is saying in the same way my daughter does.
While I did what I could to get her connected with help within the university, I cannot assume it is enough, even if we’ve been really blessed to encounter caring, knowledgeable professionals—and believe me, after our previous experiences with her depression, we do not trust someone just because of a title or supposed experience. Still, at a time when I do not live where my daughter does, it helps me to have these contacts who can reach out to her if she stops reaching out to them or those closest to her.
Constant vigilance—despite the cost for me. Yes, this is supposed to be my time—to either move on to what’s next or at least to mourn my losses—but I no longer feel this discord with our daughter is something personal or natural to this age in her life.
No, I believe major depression is talking for her, drowning out the sounds of possibility and hope that do exist in the midst of all that seems so hard right now. The good she minimizes while amplifying the bad.
I must fight for the someday of her feeling better while her defenses are down, even as I and others direct her to believe that she can fight for herself. Someday can’t come soon enough—especially for her.
And so, I also pray without ceasing all the day long.
(c) 2009 Christiana Lambert
This is the very first year Christiana and Jackson are not in school together. Unlike many twins, they did not separate for their freshmen year in college. That made our lives easier—one location, one calendar, one move-in day, one school to get to know.
1995 First Day of Preschool
The kids’ initial separation occurred earlier this year when Christiana accepted a job working as a conference assistant for Fort Lewis College. When I picked her up for a short stay between the end of the semester and the start of her job, she was pretty angry with him. We took her back before he arrived home. While talking with Jackson, we discovered he was frustrated with her.
Although they had moved into different dorm buildings, she had moved into his building within a couple months. Easier to spend time to together that way, but also easier to fall into old patterns. We didn’t used to call them “The Bickersons” for nothing—and, yet, they are very close.
Within a couple weeks of being apart this spring, they were already missing each other and trying to figure out how to visit one another despite the 13-hour round trip drive.
All along we’ve worried about whether Jackson could stay at Fort Lewis, but Christiana is the one who started to question whether the college was right for her, ultimately giving notice from her work there after two months and coming home to her old job.
Meanwhile she waited to see if she could get accepted into Colorado State University and get everything in order to transfer for the fall—if she decided to make the change. Jackson was happy to have her back home, but not so excited about the possible longer separation.
The funny thing was that our relationship with him became less strong once she came home. Reminded me of how often those two were a force against us when they were children. Twins can be a powerful team and woe to those who would try to get in between them, even unintentionally.
1997 First Day of School
Here it is the second week of school already for her and the first for him.
She and we jumped through a lot of hoops to get her set up for fall semester. We moved her possessions into an apartment a couple weekends ago and then she and I returned a few days later for transfer orientation—she to stay and I to return home. During orientation, the facilitators’ words allowed me to see I was in mourning for the change myself even though I feel it is the right move for her and am glad to have her closer to us. It’s just I thought I knew what to expect for this their sophomore year.
Very few parents of multiples get to have their kids at the same college—we’re just going through the more typical transition in our family a year later than most do. In the end what matters is that each kid follows the path that is right for him or her.
Jackson had time off work before needing to leave for school, so he insisted on going to visit Christiana to “help” her with her first few days of school. I know he slept in late while she started the next step in her education, but I also think he provided a steadying presence as she starts to adjust to the paradigm shift of moving her studies from a small liberal arts college to a large university.
He came home saying he’d like to live with her again in the few years after they get out on their own. I have no idea if that’s a good plan or not, but I think they’ll have a better idea after they have lived separately for the next few years.
1997
Sherman and I helped him move into his college apartment last Saturday. How strange to be at that school again without her.
The transition back to school lasted a couple weeks for our family this time around—which is exhausting no doubt for all of us.
The road to independence has additional twists for twins and their parents—as well as a possible fork or two. We parents will just try to enjoy the drive, even while traveling without a map.
(c) 2009 Christiana Lambert
Just Monday our foster dachshund crossed over that Rainbow Bridge. We don’t know how old he was, but when the rescue group found him emaciated and wandering the streets three years ago, they thought he was twelve. Despite his sketchy background and his pronounced health problems, he lived a full lifespan.
We weren’t being totally altruistic when we let him come to our house—in fact, Christiana was convinced having a small dog, specifically a dachshund, was an anecdote to the sadness she felt late at night when Fordham, our love sponge of an English Springer Spaniel, had retired to his cushion for a long night’s sleep. And though Sherman and I weren’t looking for another dog—especially a small dog—we were in favor of anything positive that would help her through the night.
Besides, he wasn’t supposed to be our forever dog. According to the rescue group, we were just supposed to have him for a week or two. But the economy hit dogs and rescue groups hard—our contacts with the group became fewer and fewer, until we knew we must be his forever family—how could we break a heart again that had already been so broken?.
(c) 2010
Although he never won over the jealous Fordham, he did worm his way into the rest of our hearts, even if he could only give so much love before he seemed to need to retreat. Christiana was disappointed in that, but she understood brokenness enough to love him still.
I would not have chosen to bring home a dog with a small dog bladder or an enlarged heart. I had dealt with hypothyroidism in dogs before, but not in this era of constant expensive blood tests and not with a dog with such a resistant thyroid function—he ended up taking almost as much thyroid medication as I do even though his weight was about 90% lower than mine. And, I had never even heard of the dog lice that apparently arrived with him and required expensive treatments for both him and Fordham.
And, yet, there was something about how jaunty his short-legged run was every time we returned home. He liked us; he really did, just in a very different manner than a spaniel does.
(c) 2010
Though Fordham’s possessive behavior and big dog klutzy ways made Abel nervous, he never stopped wanting to share his company. When Fordham’s final illness became evident, even Abel seemed stressed.
For about six weeks after Fordham was gone, when Abel’s thyroid level was ideal, he seemed just a little younger and a little more relaxed. If Christiana had not brought him into our home a couple years earlier, we would have really felt the emptiness of our arms after losing my mother and Fordham one after the other. Abel settled into the stillness that was that time and took care of us.
We are essentially people who crave the chaos and over-the-top love that comes from English Springer Spaniels, but we will always be grateful to Abel for helping us through our dark spring.
When I returned from my puppy fever road trip, I saw how much Abel had aged and just how late it was for him. I prayed he would not be too stressed by the newest family members and that we still had a few more months with him.
(c) 2011
In the end, Abel was a guy who rolled with life, accepting Furgus and Sam into what was now his home—and even acting a little envious of their young limbs and ability to play together. I’m so glad that Furgus calmed down enough in Abel’s last few weeks to begin napping and sleeping with Abel, giving him a closeness he had craved with Fordham but never experienced.
(c) 2011 Sherman Lambert
Abel required a lot of care in these past four months or so, but what I want to remember is his joy on car rides as he got to sit on my lap while the big dogs were confined, the excitement he showed on our mountain camping trip, or how happy he looked when he accompanied the boys on their walks—from the seat of a converted baby umbrella stroller. He longed to be part of a pack and to the end, he was.
Crossing over was hard work for him, but he did it here—in his forever home—with us all under the same roof.
In a year of so much loss, I know who rescued whom, even though loving him also added to my losses.
Today’s my birthday and I’m getting a pretty big present: my daughter.
What a difference a year makes. We took both kids to college—six and a half hours away—in late August. The distance is just a little too far away for many weekend visits and when they do come home during the school year, they really aren’t in town for much longer than 36 hours. Their physical absence from home was pretty complete.
And yet, kids today communicate differently than we did. It’s hard to cut the apron strings when you can be in constant contact through texting, chat, and e-mail.
Those first weeks, Christiana found herself in a less than warm dorm situation while Jackson was having the social time of his life. Although she had plenty of time to call us, I knew she needed to be connecting with her life there and that I wasn’t supposed to be trying to solve all her problems from a distance.
Most of us find it hard to let go of our kids these days, but even agreeing to have her go to school so far away was difficult for me after her dance with depression.
I tried to set up her medical care through the college’s counseling center, but they bungled the care enough that neither she nor we trusted them to come through for her. Continuing to work with longtime trusted providers so far away from where she was living was only slightly better than having no providers at all.
Just when things seemed darkest for her, Christiana figured out—on her own—what she needed to do to integrate better into college. She found a roommate who was living in her brother’s dorm building. Won’t go in to the whole long story, but that place became home.
Which—unfortunately for us—meant she, like her brother, stopped talking with us much.
I know our kids are supposed to separate from us at this point in life, but here’s where I go back to sounding like that really old-timer again. Really, kids today do communicate differently. Because they can contact you at all hours, they don’t contact you regularly. I know from talking with parents that I’m not the only parent who has this problem with their college-aged kids.
Despite being able to talk almost at will thanks to today’s technology, we just don’t. Or at least our kids can’t slow down enough to talk with us during the normal waking hours for middle-aged parents. I think my kids were more disconnected from me than I was from my parents for my three months studying in Spain. We talked once for five minutes, but wrote very detailed letters.
When you only hear from your kids when they are in crisis, you don’t know if they are in a constant state of crisis or if they are only having a bad moment. You lose the connection with what’s going right in their lives and you can’t say whether your perspective on what’s going wrong is very accurate.
Christiana interviewed for and was offered a full-time summer job at school. Although we wanted her to come home, earning for four solid months seemed a pretty good opportunity during these times of high unemployment for young people.
Despite the fact we helped her get set up for staying the summer and then moved her to her new apartment, we just felt distant from her. Without a whole lot of communication or time together, she seemed to be someone we didn’t know anymore.
Meanwhile Jackson came home. He’s been here for almost two months. Even though he rarely called us while away at college, being around him in person has been a joy.
Something just didn’t feel right about Christiana’s being gone still—maybe it’s too soon for this separation, maybe the situation wasn’t right—but when she explained why she’d like to come home, things finally felt right. After working another couple weeks, today’s the day we welcome her back into our home.
Although we haven’t been empty nesters since Jackson returned, it’s still going to be a big adjustment to have everyone in one house. All I know is though I was ready for her to go away to college, I wasn’t ready to feel so far removed from her life.
Welcome back, dear one! Time to create a new normal in our changing relationship.
Happy birthday to me.
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. Kahlil Gibran
(C) 1994 Elda Mae Lange
So many opinions about what matters most for our children: happiness, fulfillment, money-making careers, service, sharing our values, etc. It’s a thin line between wanting what’s best for them and wanting what’s best for us.
Too often we assume there is only one road to happiness or that our kids want what we want—or should, even if they don’t. It’s hard enough to be young and in transition without our own self-serving expectations adding to the stress.
And then when you’re the one walking across the stage in that cap and gown, sometimes it seems that everyone else on that stage has the future all figured out—and that’s another form of expectation—that you should know where you’re going at 22 and just stay on a straight path.
The truth is, instead, for many of us that path is really more smurvy-curvy (sorry—that’s Sherman’s expression for all those roads with those 20 mph or even 10 mph signs we encounter in the mountains.)
This past weekend Sherman and I traveled to see our nephew Chris graduate from college. Some of his friends have marriages and/or jobs all lined up—their futures are so bright they have to wear shades. I wish them well.
However, if Chris’ father, my brother, had stayed on his expected path from his graduation, there would have been no Chris. If you’d told Scott at his graduation he was going to end up working in human resources in Oklahoma, he would have thought you were nuts.
Scott has built a good life filled with work, service, family, and friends while doing things in a place he never imagined he’d call home. I can tell you my parents would have rather he stayed closer to them, but to them it was more important that he pursue his dreams for himself than live out their dreams.
When he was little, Chris said he wanted to be a doctor. My mom—the woman who let both Scott and me go where we wanted because she wished most for our happiness—got stuck on that concept, especially as dementia claimed more of her thoughts. I worried that Chris felt tied to her dream that was no longer his dream. I can promise you she would have been proud of him no matter what path he pursued, as long as he worked hard and treated others well, but that wasn’t the message he received.
Nonetheless, the Mom I knew would have approved of both him and the speeches at his commencement ceremony—don’t know if he was listening to them, but I was. The main speaker admonished the graduates not to live out others’ dreams at the same time she discussed how her path was anything but straight—yet today she is considered to be at the top of her field.
As she said, she didn’t think she would have been very good at what she did if she had studied the marine biology her father wanted her (himself?) to study.
For everyone out there trying to decide what their kids should “be” in their grown-up years, I suggest they consider helping their kids “be” themselves.
And for all those kids out there who still don’t know what it’s going to mean to be themselves and have a career/life, I suggest they avoid comparing themselves to people who have other dreams/paths. Life is a process, not an end product.
To Chris I want to say—that with his work ethic, values, and concern for how he treats others—that he’s going to figure it out, even if the first few steps on the path aren’t as direct as originally envisioned.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite . . . . (Gibran) He sees that His arrows go swift and far—and makes seemingly circuitous paths straight.
(c) 2009 Christiana Lambert
Such transitions in life were different when everything wasn’t available 24/7.
Every Sunday night, whether convenient or not, I called my parents at 11:00 p.m. EST and my brother called them at 11:00 p.m. CST. Long distance was expensive, so we tried hard to discuss anything necessary, money-wise and/or decision-wise at that time, as well as fit in talk about what was happening with me at college and with them back home.
Yes, we had no e-mail, IM, Facebook, Skype, or any of that. Gone was gone. We did not see each other, period. And it was a rare (and spoiled) person in my dorms who talked to her parents frequently on the telephone, even though many of my dorm-mates came from families with money.
When we communicated, we had to make it count.
Now I can see pictures of my kids in real time, thanks to mobile uploading on Facebook and can talk to their images thanks to Skype. They can text me with “send money” requests and call me when there is trouble or decisions to be made.
What we don’t seem to do is connect. I can only surmise how they are doing from Facebook pictures and status updates.
Look, I’m fine with this empty nest thing from a day-to-day living standpoint. I like having a neater house and getting more sleep and not having to decline activities because they conflict with the kids’ events. I am enjoying developing a life after the constant focus on our kids.
But I’m not fine with being disconnected from them while they live 6 ½ hours and several mountain passes away. In the chaos of a 24/7 world, they can’t find any regular time to talk with us on their phones? Really.
In their defense, I think it takes a lot of discipline to fight against letting technology control our lives. We can spend our days and nights responding to instant attempts to connect with us while not initiating those that require us to act rather than react. We can confuse the supposed urgent contact with being the important contact.
And, it’s even harder for people who have ADD, now that the world has gone hyper-ADD itself.
Yes, both my kids have ADD and struggle with time now that they don’t have me to point out the chronos from the kairos. Apparently I wore my chronos role too strongly in our household and they are ill-prepared for a world that, though it may run 24/7, does indeed have time limitations.
However, technology or not, at some point a person has to realize that making real time for people is the only way to maintain connections.
I can’t make my kids contact me and I refuse to sit around waiting for calls that aren’t going to come.
For myself, I’m going to add a little low-tech structure to my life—even if it will cause me to be more reactive than proactive for several months—by getting a puppy and maybe even rescuing or fostering a young adult dog. Short of acquiring opposable thumbs, the dogs will just have to communicate with me face to face.
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