Change is…Good?

A post from June 2007.

In seven days, after 16 years in the same beautiful Victorian house in a Minneapolis neighborhood we love, our family is moving to Atlanta. Loss is a full-time occupation at the moment.

The picture above is a cup of dirt and grass my five-year-old daughter collected from around the legs of her swingset as we dismantled and discarded it. The new family wants the swingset out of the yard, so rather than waving to it as we drive off, my kids had to watch as I euthanized it.

First we gave them a full afternoon to ride the swings and say goodbye.

Then the ax fell.

Our move is not part of God’s plan. It’s not even a job transition. Either of those would have made it easier to deflect the kids’ occasional plunges into grief at the coming loss, not to mention our own. We could claim it was out of our hands.

Instead, we’re stuck with free will. We’re moving because I no longer have a brick-and-mortar job, which makes it possible to live closer to family and to flee the northern winter. We’re moving, in other words, because Mom and Dad decided to move.

Free will is a bitch.

A few months ago, everyone was thrilled about the move, but the approaching reality is more, shall we say, textured. Two nights ago my eleven-year-old boy literally cried himself to sleep. Like me, he doesn’t make friends at the drop of a hat. Unlike me, he has also acquired an actual girlfriend before acquiring an actual pimple.

When he asked me why, why, why we were moving, and whether it was too late to bump that inexorable momentum off course, I had nowhere to hide — no shoulder-shrugging over some transfer by a heartless corporation or the need to move to the high desert so little Timmy’s tubercular lungs could breathe freely again. No, our boy’s life was being uprooted because we, his parents, decided it would be. Three months ago he was excited about the idea. Three months ago he didn’t have a girlfriend.

Even beyond the near future, the consequences of such a move are staggering. Had my own family of origin not moved from St. Louis to LA in 1974, I would almost certainly not have gone to Berkeley, met Becca, and had the kids I now have. I’d have different kids, with a different woman. Joyless marriage and wretched, snot-nosed kids, I’m sure of it. As a result of my parent’s long-ago decision, that horrible woman is now probably married to someone else. She doesn’t know what she’s missing. Heh.

Now here we are, rewriting the lives of our children and of countless others born and unborn with a single decision. They’ll now grow up with different friends and most likely marry different people than they would have. Assuming they have kids, tens of thousands of human beings will end up existing who would never have come to pass had we stayed put — and tens of thousands of others who would have resulted from their likely unions here will never be. Did we kill off the next Gandhi…or the next bin Laden? Or, on the other hand, have we now set into motion the creation of another future hero or monster?

Free will isn’t for the faint of heart.

I love to think about the chaos of innumerable butterfly wings that beat out the details of our brief lives. So do my kids. It’s endlessly fascinating to consider the real consequences of the absent helmsman. But here in the present, we’re drowning in the losses of the moment.

That’s okay. It’s good for all of us in the long run. I don’t think kids benefit from being too thoroughly protected from the experience of loss. It’s a guaranteed part of the experience of being alive. They’ll gain at least as much in resiliency, adaptability and self-knowledge from this transition as they will lose.

Right?