Conversations and change

Some more of week 3 and the start of week 4.

Conversations and change

A wonderful conversation

My post about Kramstable getting ready to leave home received a lot of responses, and I thank everyone who took the time to leave me a comment. I appreciate your kindness and your respectful words. It means a lot that you took the time to share your stories and your thoughts with me.

The kind words continued to flow into the next week when I ran into one of my Pilates classmates, H, in the street. She’s mother of adult children who have left home and have come back, so she knows what it’s like, and she knows how sad I am.

I don’t think I’d ever seen her outside Pilates before, so meeting her was unexpected, and I didn’t expect her to stop and talk to me after saying hello. But she did.

H was kind and supportive, and said many things to me about this time of life. One of the things we talked about was something I’d also been tentatively thinking about.

I’m sure this is a common thing, so walk with me here.

The things we do

If you have kids, you’ll know that this is a life stage where we don’t have as much time for ourselves as we once did, and we spend a lot of time responding to our child’s (or childs’) needs. Doing things for them, with them, about them.

For me this looked like working part-time and staying in the same job for 12 years rather than looking for promotions or developing any kind of career. I had a workplace that provided me a lot of flexibility to do ‘mum’ things and I didn’t want to jeopardise that by moving elsewhere. I wanted to make the most of the time when Kramstable was young and do as much as I could for him and with him.

This included working from home, continuing breastfeeding (long before my workplace became breastfeeding accredited), and leaving work early for after-school pickups. It also involved taking a lot of time out of my work days to attend school assemblies and presentations, to do parent help and to go on excursions. (I went on A LOT of excursions. They were great. Even the one that involved swinging on a rope off a platform over to another one where the aim was to fit as many people as possible . . .)

I wouldn’t have changed any of this.

And I appreciate having had a workplace that let me do this when so many people don’t get anywhere near the opportunities I had. I was incredibly fortunate.

The working life-with-child also meant constant time management and planning for school holidays, which seemed to arrive earlier and earlier each year. One school holidays would be over and next minute there was an email from vacation care asking you to book in for the next lot of holidays. There was no rest! Negotiating annual leave, Nanna day care, vacation care, and which one of us was taking what days off this time. I was never in any danger of being one of those people who accumulated so much leave HR forced me to take it.

Yes, this is a massively privileged position to be in, and there are much harder things people have to do than sort out their school holidays. I have no complaints. I’m grateful for all of it. I also know it was significantly easier for me to do the things I wanted to do with just one child and family support compared to what it would have been like with two or (the horror!) more.

But! This isn’t the point.

The point is, investing all this time in being mum, doing mum things, at the same time as I was working, meant something had to make way. (You see where I’m going here, right?) I was no longer centre of my own world, and what I wanted for me had to take a back seat. What this meant, over time, was that I started to lose track of what I really wanted, and who I was, outside of being Mum of Shrek (IYKYK).

And this is what H and I spoke about. (We also talked about other things—including what a great opportunity this is to clear out my wardrobe and, more generally, consider what I want my home to be like once I no longer have a young person living here. Ohhhhh! It’s way too early for me to start thinking about this. It makes me cry. But H said the time will come when I’ll want to. It just isn’t yet.)

I suppose I would have started thinking about ‘me’ regardless of whether Kramstable was staying or leaving. Over the past few years as he’s got more independent and the opportunities to be involved in his schooling have dried up, I’ve obviously had more time to work on my own things. But they’ve kind of slotted in without any grand plan. As things have come up and I’ve wanted to do them, if I’ve had time, I’ve done them.

Maybe that’s okay.

Or maybe it’s time to take stock as H suggested. Obviously I’m still Kramstable’s mother and that will never change. But unlike if he were staying, this will a seismic jolt to my life. He won’t be part of my day-to-day life and I won’t have to factor him into any plans.

It’s a huge change, which once it’s happened, will raise the question: who do I want to be now?

You can’t, H said, just go back to who you were before you had him and pick up your life from there, because you aren’t that person any more.

I’m glad. That person drank too much and was pretty unhealthy.

She also didn’t have the kind of urgency to do something that I can feel starting to creep in when I realise I’ve most likely lived more years than I have left to live. (Ouch. Thanks, Oliver Burkeman.)

And H encouraged me to really think about this and start to design a life for myself for this next stage, whatever that stage is. This is something I had tentatively been thinking about, in some of the spaces between the grief and the tears, and it was nice to hear someone else’s take on how to navigate this time.

A sky of orange and pink is reflected in a body of water. There are dark hills in the background
Sunrise over timtumili minanya / River Derwent

Change marches on

And so, as I work through my up-and-down feelings and ‘what’s next’, Kramstable’s charge towards life in another city continues. He’s excited and it really is great that he’s getting to go and do what he really wants to do!

Meanwhile, I’m back at work after the Christmas break, feeling a bit unmotivated but trying to do what I’m supposed to be doing. Some days are better than others.

Change fatigue

Last week, I watched a webinar recording that my work had arranged at the end of last year on change fatigue. Now, workplaces often offer sessions on change when they’re undergoing some kind of restructure that’s going to result in job losses—I’m sure many of us have been there. But though we’ve been restructuring, there haven’t been massive scale job reductions. HR had organised this webinar to support people who might be affected by the changes for other reasons.

I missed the original event but my team leader had recommended all of us watch it.

So I did.

While it was intended for work, what I wasn’t expecting was how relevant it was to what’s happening at home right now. As soon as the presenter started speaking, I realised this, and a lightbulb went off in my head. Everything that’s going on with me is a reaction to change.

I could have cried with relief. (I actually did.) Everything is normal and expected and get-through able, even if it doesn’t feel like it right now.

Common responses to change

One of the most important sections in this was learning about common responses to change which may include

  • Thoughts in response to an uncertain situation and questions we don’t have answers for. What’s going to happen, what does this mean for me, what ifs. Maybe there will be positives.
  • Emotions like fear, anxiety, sadness and grief, frustration, anger and even guilt, as well as some hopeful feelings.
  • Body reactions such as fatigue, headaches, trouble sleeping (oh, hi), and digestive issues.
  • Behaviour including withdrawal, cynicism, disengagement. You might distance yourself while you work through what’s happening. Or you might resist the change because things are happening too quickly and you want to slow things down so you can catch up and understand.

So much of this is going on for me right now, including finding some positives and immediately slamming down on myself for feeling positive about a thing that I also feel so sad about. It feels like I’m betraying Grieving Barb by finding new opportunities.

Go figure that one out.

Anyway, much of what the presenter suggested doing on a personal level to support yourself (myself) at times like this is very sensible. It’s also what I’d want to be doing to take care of myself normally. Eating well, moving regularly, taking breaks, prioritising sleep . . . Even talking kindly to myself instead of being judgemental and feeling guilty about the way I feel.

I felt a massive sense of relief watching this. Knowing that everything I’m feeling is normal and it’s okay and I will be okay.

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