seasons & self
March 31, 2016 § 2 Comments
Last fall I sent my children off to new schools in an unfamiliar community buoying them daily with encouragements to strike up conversations and invite introductions; to intentionally look for opportunities to connect.
I nudged my children purposefully, firmly, toward vulnerability. I watched each child work through the emotions of creating new connections, the tender fractures that come from opening themselves to chance.
Disappointment and acceptance created an emotional topography of self and community that we used to map the experiences of friendship and the complexities of risk as they created a space of self somewhere new. In these early days I contented myself by disappearing into the background; centering the unfamiliar in new routines and borrowed comfort.
It was only when I found myself standing, alone, in an atrium that echoed with the casual greetings and easy exchanges of old friends that I remembered the awkward sense of displacement that comes from feeling lost in a crowd.
Gone were the early morning confidences, lunch dates and PTC meetings. There were no more after school conversations at the playground or fragmented exchanges between grocery store aisles. It has been a year of invisibility as my husband and I lost ourselves in time shared settling our home and beginning again at something new.
There have been weekends shared with old friends nearby and longer weekends with friends from a place we still remember as home, but most days I am still a ghost among strangers; indulging in the whim and work of quieter pursuits.
As the winter battles spring in the work of changing seasons I am lost to memories of summers past. Rain rattles against the windows and I wonder if there is magic enough in sunshine that new hellos might stick to our hearts like sand against our skin.
scribblechic 
Well-written and thoughtful. It is true, that change often brings loneliness. Think about military families who are constantly uprooted. It must be hard.
Growing up I moved, yearly, between my parents’ homes; a strange compromise arranged to create a sense of balance, or fairness, between parents. I had imagined, after all these years, I was immune to the tenderness of feeling misplaced, but it was not entirely as I expected.
I love that you acknowledged the reality of military families and lent us all a moment of mindfulness for their experiences.