Things change; or, the New Normal

The end of my vacation nears, my annual sojourn to Michigan’s glorious Upper Peninsula, where my troll self (if you don’t know what a troll is, in local reference, you aren’t from or haven’t been to da U.P.; look it up) and my troll family have vacationed for years. It is truly a magnificent place, northern Michigan, and I like it.

In the last few years, however, it’s changed. Or, rather, the circumstances around it have become altered. We still see the same friends when we’re there, have nachos and pitchers of beer at the same watering hole, have a drink for old Uncle Frank at the Runway Bar, his preferred haunt, and Hessel and Cedarville and the Les Cheneaux Islands still greet us as usual. But our own kids aren’t always with us.

Last year it was only my wife and I for the whole two weeks. This year my second son and daughter were with us for the first four days before having to head home for work and school. Our oldest son is in the Army, so he can’t travel with us very readily at all. In short, we’ve aged and so have they. Adulthood and responsibility are upon them.

They wear it well, so far, the three of them, and I don’t see that they won’t continue to grow and mature in their worlds. They have their lives now, and I rather believe they’re creating good ones. I pray that is the case and that it will continue, as I trust it will.

This isn’t meant to be all cloying and sloppily sentimental; in fact, I mean something rather different. If you would have asked me fifteen years ago what it would be like to not have my kids around every day, vacation and all, perhaps vacation especially, about what it would be like to deal with the time that were out on their own, I would have talked about the terrible adjustment it was going to be, that I would miss them horribly, that I would yearn for the old days. Yet now that it’s happened, I feel almost completely opposite. I feel comfortable with it. A good, positive comfort in things as they are now.

Not that I don’t miss them as children per se; I certainly still have pangs of sentimentality when I think over the things we used to do and the places we used to go to as a family. We’re still that family, and we still see each other and do things together, so there’s ultimately no missing that. It’s just that, today, things are the way they’re supposed to be. Our kids are supposed to grow and become responsible human beings. When that happens, why not embrace it? Why pine for the old times when the new are just as rewarding? Why try to hold on to bygone moments when today itself offers such promise, when our kids have become the good adults we worked towards them becoming? Remember the past, look to the future, but live the moment.

Right now, I think this moment, and the years coming, look pretty good. I love and am proud of my kids, even if I’m 325 miles from two of them, and 800 from the third. It’s simply the new normal, and it isn’t bad at all. Things have turned out they way they ought, and there's no reason to lament it.