Change is hard.
Even in the best of circumstances, for the best of reasons, change is hard. Parenting is hard. Toddlers are really fucking hard. The change of moving to a new place, be it the next town over or across the world, is also hard. Especially as a parent. There are the stressors of relocating: finding childcare, figuring out banks, transport, taxes, grocery stores, and healthcare. When moving to a new country you get to do all of this in a strange language and culture. Even in the best of circumstance; when you’ve got it all figured out. You’ve found a great job or volunteer position doing what you love with wonderful people. Your kid/s love their school. Finances are not an issue. The language of the place to which you have moved is one you already speak. The place is safe and well organized. You are still away from friends, family, and all the things that support you. All the things you know.
Change is messy.
Regardless of scale, change is messy. Change, significant change, involves a lot of complicated feelings, debate, disagreement, uncertainty, and old fashioned leaps of faith. That’s before you add anyone else to the mix. Yet even internal change means involving other people unless you live a life of isolation. Especially when you are the mom.
As a trailing spouse and stay at home parent isolation and overthinking can lead to feelings of loneliness and not belonging. Especially here in Denmark where stay at home parents are few and far between and the locals form their social networks in elementary school. Being an introvert can make things both harder and easier. As an introvert I don’t feel the sting of isolation as harshly as an extrovert does. But it’s harder for me to tell when it slips into loneliness, and much harder for introverts in general to expend the energy to do something about it. To make the changes needed to seek out the social connections that we all need.
Change is constant.
The contradiction with parenting is that kids, from toddler to teen, love routine. We all like knowing what is coming next. But parenting, life, is all about change. Day to day, year to year, our kid/s become different people. Our beaming baby becomes a truculent toddler, becomes a confident kid, becomes a terrifying teenager, becomes an adventurous adult, and becomes a thousand different things in-between. All this change is going on around us while we fight to maintain some sense of order and some sense of self.
Change takes time.
Adjusting to a big life change, going through the process of adjusting and changing, takes an average of two to three years. We all must be patient, ideally both patient and wise. Dealing with change is about self-respect and well-being.
Doing better means finding the balance between liking who I am right now and taking on the formidable struggle of progressing towards bettering myself. Being happy with the who in the here and now is the harder of the two. As an American self-acceptance is promoted in theory only. The reality is to be inundated in ways to upgrade yourself from make up to weight loss to self-help galore. Even the embrace yourself movement has a focus on moving towards a new and improved version of yourself. They do have a point. While liking yourself is its own goal it’s also a first step to making changes. If you don’t like yourself changing your exterior, earning material goods, traveling, may not help. As the saying goes, wherever you go, there you are. Even when where you are is the happiest country on the planet.
Change is always confusing, often painful, and occasionally joyful- sometimes all at once. Change is both unstoppable and completely necessary. No matter how we choose to deal with it-
Change is.