Night–Sweet Guard of Dreams

(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert

Maybe I’ve always had mixed feelings about nighttime—or maybe those feelings didn’t begin until after my brother Scott and I saw a man in our bedroom when we were two and four.

As far as I know, that’s as scary as this story gets, but I don’t think that memory is ever very far from my consciousness. There’s not much to tell, really, except we both agree that it happened. One night, in the brief period when we lived in a rental house before moving to our own home, my brother stage-whispered to me from his twin bed, “Trina, there’s a man in the room. Hide under the covers.”

I hid and eventually fell back asleep. The next morning we both told the story to our mother, who doubted it until she discovered the cellar door unlocked. Though we had just moved to a town of no bigger than 600, apparently a man who was losing his battle with mental illness had a habit of entering peoples’ homes in the middle of the night. One resident woke to see a lit cigarette glowing in the kitchen and discovered the man relaxing at the table.

My brother Scott and I in 1964.

Put my early experience together with a vivid imagination and my quicksilver ADD mind, and you can guess that I didn’t really grow up falling asleep too well. My increasing levels of nearsightedness probably didn’t help either. Even though I lived in two more homes before I left for college and then again to strike out on my own for good, my insomnia never abated in my family’s homes.

Luckily, the worst of my insomnia ended with that final move. No idea why—I’ve lived in six places since—all different as far as I can tell.

Which is not to say I’ve made complete peace with the night.

First of all, let me say that I love staying up at night—it’s not just about avoiding falling asleep. I am the queen of getting a second wind around bedtime. However, I don’t really like mornings and I do “get” that if I stay up late all the time, then those mornings will feel even more unpleasant than they normally do.

Second of all, I know that sleeping with my husband makes a big difference. I’m lucky that I haven’t had to sleep alone much in past couple decades. Plus, he got me Lasik surgery which means I can see if any bad guys are in the house—haven’t seen any, thank you very much! Still, he’ll tell you that everyone in my family of origin—including my father, mother, and yes, my brother Scott, as well as our own two children—has or had some problems with sleep.

He likes to say something such as, “What do you people have against going to sleep? I like going to sleep—why don’t you?”

Good question. You see, I like sleep a lot—I just don’t like going to sleep.

After you go through all that sleeplessness when your kids are young—and then again when they’re teenagers and young adults—you really learn to like that sleep. Not waiting for someone to come home and/or living with someone on a vastly different time clock was one of the greatest benefits of our short empty nest period. Doesn’t it seem so ironic, though, that the time when my body slept best happened when I couldn’t sleep much because of my kids?

Let’s just say that lately we’ve been working on improving our sleep setting and our habits since these days it doesn’t seem to take much of a distraction to interrupt our sleep. First we had to deal with old dogs that had to go out in the middle of the night and who played musical dog beds all night—without the music, of course. Then we had to deal with a puppy—at the same time my back began hurting. Well, the puppy got older but then Sherman’s back started hurting, too.

(c) 2012 Trina Lambert

So our latest step in the quest for a good night’s sleep was saying goodbye to our waterbed (with much regret!) and hello to a new mattress, box springs, and bed-frame. The almost eight-week transitional process started when we put the mattress in the waterbed frame (can’t we ever pick anything not on back order??!!), then continued when we set up the new frame and added the box springs, and ended when I also got fitted sheets (never needed those before) and a new comforter.

Even if I’ll never quite forget my early experience, we are finally enjoying sweeter dreams.

Crescent moon on high.
Handful of stars in the sky.
Night—sweet guard of dreams.
by Trina (Lange) Lambert, Age 10

Ready for Wings?

(c) 2009 Christiana Lambert

You know my messy table isn’t really the problem—it’s just an obvious sign that deep down all is not well with my soul.

This is one of those years when I can’t talk myself into seeing the happy endings—or at least the unhappy endings that lead to deeper understanding and long-term happier endings. No matter what I said about wanting to be done with talking about unhappy topics, I am not. I can’t will myself to come up with the neat and happy moral of the story that will tie up a less-than-hope-filled post.

Although I’m feeling a bit like George Bailey on the bridge, I’m not looking to jump into the river. No, I just want to take that suitcase I bought with happy travels in mind—and run—anywhere that isn’t where I’ve been.

You see, I know God is hearing my prayers, but I’m having a hard time saying them. The good thing about God is He hears the prayers that have sunk so deep within us that we can’t even use our voices to speak them—they become so much a part of us that they rise from our very pores.

If nothing else, perhaps He’ll send me a bumbling Clarence to show me a better path than the one I am on.

Sometimes no amount of research or any continued pursuit for new solutions can fix a problem. And you especially can’t make someone else choose to see the hope in their situation if they prefer to see only loss.

You’re probably thinking I must be talking about myself, right? See, that’s the irony, isn’t it? So easy to see how to solve someone else’s problem, but then you look in the mirror and realize that maybe you’re so busy trying to solve someone else’s problem because it makes it easy not to be responsible for solving your own problems.

The years of trying to help others with celiac disease, dementia, depression, and ADD have taken their toll on me. I’m fresh out of perky solutions that are always met with a big “but”—because after all I have no idea how bad it is for someone else.

Well, the truth is they don’t know how bad it has been for me to watch them suffer. If I could, I would wave a magic wand and remove the problem. Would be much better than searching for other possible solutions that will never be good enough because the only solution the person really wants is to wake up completely healed.

They also don’t know how much I’ve suffered watching them refuse to consider anything but Plan A when I would fight to find them Plan B through Plan Infinity to aid in their movements forward. This week I realize I’m done being the pep squad. All that energy spent helping those who at this point won’t help themselves is making me feel like a failure. I know I am not—I tried, as God is my witness, I tried. Maybe I tried so hard that they didn’t think they needed to do so. But in the end all any of us really can do is help ourselves.

And during all those times of caregiving, I did not help myself. In some ways it’s just not possible to take care of yourself in the midst of others’ crises, but in other ways you have to be careful not to see any results as the only proof that what you did mattered. Some problems can’t be fixed despite anyone’s best efforts.

And so, I need a Clarence to come show me how I helped even if I could not beat back the demons of the diseases. I need to know that without me this place would have become a Potterville. Maybe I have a bit of a savior complex, but, by God, I’d like to know that sacrificing my potential trips around the world made some difference to others.

But short of that, the only thing I can control is the direction of my own footsteps in the future. A future where I stop trying to find solutions for everyone else and start looking for my own regardless of who is coming along with me on the trip.

Clarence, are you ready to earn your wings? Then help me climb down from this bridge so I can pack my suitcase for the trip of my lifetime.

Surrounded

(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert

This past Sunday our church members lighted candles honoring those living with mental illness. Once upon a time, I would debate with myself whether ADHD was mental illness enough to justify lighting a candle. I know it is, but as much a part as it played in our lives, we seemed to have a reasonably functional family life.

Now that we know how a family can be changed by major depression, there’s no question we need God’s guidance as well as prayers—I don’t debate about lighting candles anymore.

While acting to ignite a wick is a choice, I don’t always have such a choice over which songs pop up unbidden in my head. As I’ve mentioned before, songs stick with me easily—whether or not I want them to do so. Maybe it’s the years of running, when a good rhythm can help keep me on pace or when I’ve even used the time to memorize songs. More likely it’s just one of the quirks of my brain—with a mother like mine, no doubt I began hearing music while still in the womb—before I ever saw this world, let alone walked or ran a step.

Raised on music, but fascinated by words, how can I help but be drawn to the combination?

Though memorization isn’t my strong point, words and notes start to sink into my brain when heard in tandem. Even then, I’m more likely to paraphrase than to store everything just as heard or read.

Seeing all those candles lighted by people who also must know mental illness too well stirred up songs and lyrics again for me. I wonder, how many, like my daughter and me, get hung up in the wrong part of The Fray’s “You Found Me” lyrics?

Where were you when everything was falling apart, all my days were spent by a telephone that never rang and all I needed was a call that never came . . .

Still, much of the music in my head comes from hymns and songs absorbed over years singing in church. Since I don’t have many bible verses memorized, often the biblical words I do access come from those songs. Now that I’m back in a choir, I have added more songs and words available to me in random moments.

My favorite bible verse—which I mostly have memorized—is Micah 6:8b: and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? And yet, I had never really paid attention to the previous verses until singing them—or not singing them, as it often turns out when my throat stops my song mid-note. Micah 6:7b asks: Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

I know that verse 8 declares no child nor living being must be sacrificed, but then why must my daughter be set upon with feeling so abandoned by my God—the God she felt so clearly as a child yet now wonders where He is. While she questions how He can be her God, I often fall to anger, asking how He could do this to my child, my firstborn, to whom he has given many gifts yet seemingly not the gift of believing that who she is matters to Him and to so many others in this world. Once again, I am stuck on the wrong section of the lyrics.

Just as Micah’s words tell me that God has shown me what is good, The Fray also sings:

You found me lying on the floor, surrounded . . .

I only have to look at all those candles to know that God has surrounded me with others lifting up my family. When we ask where God is, we need to look around us. Just because the healing we want doesn’t happen as we want doesn’t mean God has abandoned us. If we can’t hear Him calling on the telephone, maybe we’re looking for the wrong Caller ID. Everyone walking humbly with us is walking humbly with God. In the end, God doesn’t have to find us because He is always with us—and in all those who walk beside us in our darkest days.

Fighting for Someday

(c) 2011 Christiana Lambert

I’ve been down before, heck I’m most likely down now thanks to assorted losses, but that doesn’t mean I understand what it’s like to have major depression. What I’ve experienced is more that feeling where you hit a bad spot, but you keep problem-solving or trying different things to feel better. You know, you believe that “someday” you will feel better, even if you don’t have a clue when that someday will be.

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.

The Fork in the Road

(c) 2009 Christiana Lambert

One year later, our kids’ leaving home is entirely different from the first exit. The house is quiet once again, but how we got here is a whole new story.

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.

Gift of the Return

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.

Plugged In Yet Disconnected

(c) 2009 Christiana Lambert

A long, long time ago in a country pretty similar to ours, I was a young adult. Our technology, such that it was, used to give some structure to our time. Before we had cable TV, our stations went off the air at midnight. We could only watch TV shows when they were on and had to wait between commercial breaks. Long distance rates didn’t drop to barely reasonable until 11:00 p.m. Of course, for decades electricity had allowed people to work or play the whole night through, but our world’s transformation to a sense of timelessness hadn’t quite been so complete when I went away to college—1000 miles away from home—knowing I would see my family only every three to six months.

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.

Biding Time

(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert

Just when you think you’re living in the here and now, sometimes you respond in a way that tells you you’re not over the past yet. At least I do.

My days are much calmer than they’ve been in years—and my nights, too. The kids are away at college and my mom’s health has been relatively stable. Sherman and I have been doing projects that have been put off since my mom fell and moved to Denver almost three years ago—and since her rapid decline into dementia became evident and required so many extra tasks—and brought on a whole lot of worry and loss.

Truth is I couldn’t really even give Mom the attention and love she deserved during much of that journey because my life was divided between concern for her and concern for helping my daughter to find a way out of depression.

For so long I lived one day at a time—and for a while there, it seemed I could only focus on more like one hour at a time.

When stuck in caregiving mode, “everyone” tells you to take care of yourself. You do what you can—I exercised and blogged as much as I could. But so much was left undone. And, as I’ve noted before, when I’m upset, I’m less efficient (thanks to those darn emotions!) than usual.

Since I’ve never really been efficient, the “to do” lists were even more overwhelming during our hard times. To retain sanity, I had to pull in and focus on caring for my loved ones and myself. The larger community of this world was going to have to wait for my time and efforts.

Even after a few months of the slower pace of the empty nest, I’m still saying “no” to many requests. I have the time on the calendar—I do—but I just feel pulled to spend time here in my home where, thanks to some of our recent work, the chaos is no longer overwhelming. It’s as if the adrenaline has not quite left my system and I have to take my pace down to a crawl to relearn that not everything requires a “fight or flight” response. I’ve had to be so flexible and reactive for so long that I find it especially hard to give up planned down time—even when people really need help. I also know that there will likely be more surprises on Mom’s final journey.

This is where the little angel and devil begin fighting over my shoulders about what I do and don’t deserve. I can’t tell if this is a moral dilemma or a health dilemma—or both. Part of me feels as if I am acting selfishly right now, but another part is not sure I am recovered enough yet from all the twists in my own journey to reach out to others very often.

As it turns out, lately, thanks to the little physical ironies of aging, I’ve found myself awake when I would prefer to be asleep. Since my usual get-to-sleep techniques don’t seem to be working, I’ve figured out I might as well spend the extra time praying. If I can’t put my hands to work doing for others, maybe I can put them together in prayer.

All my life I have been much better at giving through actions versus with contemplative offerings. My everyday actions were my prayers. I pray that, in the near future, I will have worked through the scar tissue enough to return to living more as the spontaneous, giving person I used to try to be.

In the meanwhile, just give me Jesus . . . and a little more time.

These Kids are Alright

(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert

August already and the days continue to slip away until we reach our new normal.

As I prepare to go to my 30th reunion, I am easily reminded of that last summer before I left home for the first time: working, going on dates, hanging out with friends, rarely being home with my family, and getting very little sleep. There was a frantic feeling of “now or never” with my current friends and an underlying concern that maybe I’d made the wrong decision about my future, especially as friends left for closer colleges, classes began for my friends still in high school, and I languished in limbo.

Why had I chosen to go so far away? To be alone where I knew no one? How would it be having to stay away from my family home for two and a half months, no matter whether or not things were going well?

In a lot of ways, I didn’t consider failure as an option. My choice just had to work. I didn’t have a fallback plan.

It helps that I chose to attend a small school where almost everyone had to make new friends. Even if some of them could go home or might know one or two other kids from high school, most people stayed on campus on the weekends.

But the truth is, there wasn’t a lot of time to be alone—there was too much happening. I remember it as one of the most natural and rewarding transitions of my life.

I don’t know how I figured out when to do my laundry or how much studying to do or how to balance social life with academic life or how to notice when maybe I’d burned the candle at both ends too often. I know I panicked at times, but then I dug in and did what needed to be done. Mostly it worked out and I had a great time. My parents were too far away to rescue me very much. We kids at college helped each other through our crises, although I’m sure I don’t know all the stories of those who somehow didn’t make the transition well.

Christiana and I went shopping on Sunday for things such as sheets, towels, and laundry supplies. We had to laugh because we saw a lot of moms and daughters out shopping, but no sons with their moms. I figure most of the guys are happy to have their moms pick up a couple towels and sheets—dark, of course—and they really don’t care about the rest. Yes, Jackson and I had picked out towels earlier, but softness was the major factor for him—he was perfectly happy with the colors I pointed out that would make his laundry life easier.

So my kids are where I was thirty years ago—and, just like then, sometimes things get a little tense at home. Our family and their friendships are changing, yet the kids have no idea what will happen in their futures. None of us does, really.

It seems to me more people worry these days about college not going well for their kids. Maybe it’s the money, but maybe it’s also the current climate around this transition. The word on the streets is this generation of parents doesn’t know how to let go. Gone are the days when long distance phone calls cost so much that families only talked once a week or less. Heck, I went to Spain for three months and only talked to my parents once for less than five minutes.

Today’s Denver Post has an article on college readiness for students, along with an article on readiness for parents. Apparently, one of the reasons colleges host orientation for parents (made our reservations yesterday) these days is to teach us how to parent from a distance without hindering them from growing by allowing our kids to learn some of those outside classroom lessons on their own. We’re not supposed to burn up the wires (do you think kids today know what that term means?) with multiple text messages, online communications, and phone calls trying to solve their problems. We’re to practice saying something like, “What do you think you will do about that?”

Someone suggested to Christiana that she was being unfair to her parents by going so far away to school. Heck, it’s in the same state—I went 1,000 miles away and could not return until the end of each quarter. Honestly, it’s a whole lot easier to take ownership for your problems and enjoy the social aspects of college when you can’t come home easily.

I’m going to miss my kids like crazy but I know it will be easier for all of us to adjust to our new roles by having some space to force us into the next steps. I think they’re going to have a great time—and so are we, even if it will be a little uncomfortable getting to that point.

Just as when I was pregnant, everyone wants to remind us our lives are going to change. Well, duh! And, as much as I get that, I remember that you can’t really “get” such a big change until you’re living it. But enough with the negative warnings to us: “Your house is going to be so quiet.” What do you want us to do? Put on mourning clothes and say our lives are over?

And stop telling the kids they won’t be able to handle it or pointing out all the areas where they might fail. If the initial experience doesn’t work out well enough, they’ll work through it. In this life there are do-overs and new beginnings—that’s part of learning, too.

Despite the bumps, the kids will be alright and so will we.

Dancing to a Different Beat

(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert

It’s been a big day around here—Christiana can legally buy spray paint on her own. Just kidding, there are a lot of things both kids can do on their own now that they are eighteen—they hate needles, so I’m not expecting any tattoos, though.

This birthday is just another sign of how much things are changing around our house. Pretty much everyone—and I mean almost everyone who knows we only have twins—wonders how we’ll survive this autumn when our house becomes much quieter. The question we keep hearing is, “What are you going to do with your time?”

My glib answer is that we will be able to sleep more and we won’t have to trip over so many shoes on the floor.

I have no deep answers for the question, though, because with all the family health concerns over the past few years, I haven’t had time to develop a plan for most days, let alone for sometime in the future. I know that’s not a good thing, but as much as I’m not that great of a planner in general, I am almost equally as good at doing what I need to do when faced with having to do things differently, with or without preparation. Trust me, going from DINKs (Double-Income No Kids) to sleep-deprived parents of twins who worked together was a major paradigm shift for both Sherman and me.

In the end, Sherman and I had to find our own ways, together and apart, when I gave birth to our instant family. When we face the instantaneous return to a household of two, we will no doubt each have an individual response beyond our shared experience.

However, just because I can respond to change doesn’t mean there isn’t some trauma and stress associated with transitions, especially in those situations when I encounter transitions where I actually gain enough time to think about what I’m doing.

What I do know is that I’m a lot like my mom in that I put my main focus on raising my kids. Frankly, that gets exhausting as the years pass. Some of us do a little better stepping back from that focus when tangible boundaries, such as distance, get put in place. I don’t know how the transition went for my mom, but by the time I came home after college graduation, she was ready to do things her own way in her own house. She was happy to see me, but she wasn’t interested in integrating me back into her everyday life.

It was her turn to sleep more and not trip over so many shoes.

It was also her turn to put some space between the situations and choices that are part of the often chaotic transition to adulthood and to let me handle those years—mostly—on my own.

Who will any of us in this house be next year at this time?

My most recent Chinese fortune about sums it up: “Next summer you will dance to a different beat.”

But tonight we celebrated the eighteen years we’ve had together—and will keep celebrating throughout this summer—before we leap forward into moving with whatever beat we hear next.

Happy eighteenth birthday to both Jackson and Christiana! May you have a great time as you figure out how to dance to the rhythm of living away from our home—we’ll be listening while also finding our own rhythm.

(c) 2010 Christiana Lambert