“The only thing constant in life is change.”–Francois de la Rochefoucauld
Of all the things that annoy me (and there are plenty), one of the most annoying has to be the way that some people will form an opinion about you, and then—despite all new evidence to the contrary—refuse to let it go. The grandmother who still sends you ceramic unicorns because you loved them when you were ten. The friend who always tells you that parties start half an hour before they actually do because, back in college, you were always late. The boss who gives you a list of ways you need to improve, and then refuses to recognize when are you meeting those goals. It’s like your relationship with those people is in stasis, and no matter what happens in your (or their) lives, when they are dealing with you they will always return to a certain moment in time, like a computer that has its time machine feature activated daily.
Still, as much as this annoys me, I have a confession to make: when it comes to my own children I am definitely guilty of this myself. I’ll be the first to admit it: I’m one of those moms who, if left to her own devices, would have probably left the training wheels on their bikes until they turned thirty. Who just might cut their meat for them at their own wedding dinners. Who will probably still buy them socks and underwear for Christmas when we are both in the nursing home together.
I recognized this trait in myself early on, when my daughter, Clementine, was still very small—and yet not so small that she had to be held in my arms while I tried to eat my breafast. Luckily for me I was dining out with my friend Nancy at the time, who took one look at the precarious situation and said, “Why don’t you put her in a high chair?”
“A high chair?” I said, appalled. “But she’s only a baby.”
“She’s trying to crawl on the table,” Nancy pointed out.
And she was right: Clementine was. And so, from that meal on I put her in a high chair. Of course, then I kept putting her in a high chair until her feet practically hit the ground, so it’s not really like I learned anything from it. And, in fact, when my second child came along I still hadn’t learned much about allowing room for change—I didn’t even consider putting an end to breastfeeding until he dropped a half-eaten chicken leg down the front of my nursing bra. (In retrospect, I’m glad it happened that way: as oblivious as I was, I was lucky my wake up call hadn’t been him ashing his cigarette down my bra instead.)
Unfortunately, I am the same way when it comes to their emotional changes: often I catch myself thinking things like “Clementine will never eat that; she’s too picky of an eater,” or “Clyde isn’t interested in girls yet,” and then I’ll catch myself and remember that I need to reassess my assumptions—that I’ve just turned my own internal clock back to “day before yesterday” again.
When they were younger I would track their physical growth on door jambs, marking each new inch off in black Sharpie as a way to remind myself that they were getting bigger every day. It kind of worked: or at least it always amazed me. Maybe what I should do is set up a system for doing the same thing for personal growth as well. Of course, the problem with that is: where would I ever find a doorway tall enough to hold all of the changes a person goes through from the time they are born until they turn eighteen?