I feel like it’s a bit uncouth to refer to the process of taking stock of relationships as “decluttering” – but I wanted to file these thoughts away under my journey to creating more white space in my life.
We need companionship like we need food, water, air, and shelter. It’s one of the lowest tiers in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the need for love and belonging.
I’m very fortunate to have some wonderful people in my life, namely, my parents, Eric’s parents and sister, and a small number close friends who I met during childhood or college. I don’t take it for granted that all of my kids’ grandparents are alive and well and want to be involved in their lives, or that I always have somebody to call if I really, really need to vent about something.
But after having kids, whilst all these people are so wonderful, I feel a very deep longing for and lack of other young/20 or 30-something adults in my life who live nearby and share our parenting values. Even if they don’t have kids yet; strangely that part seems less important than their attitudes towards children.
The pandemic threw a serious wrench into our attempts to form a community here, for sure. I mean, no one was really out and about in a normal capacity from March 2020 through summer 2021. But even as COVID faded into the background of life and activities returned to normal–I realized that the way we want to live and raise our kids is so, so different from other parents of young children around us. No one is “right” or “wrong,” but we are not the same.
In addition to this feeling that we need to compromise our values to fit in here, and that we will never really “belong.” Carleton Reunion reiterated for me that we are on a very different path than our cohort from a few years ago.
I felt like most people we used to know, saw my kids as a burden who I should have left at home. That we should be more flexible, whilst during this intense stage of life with toddlers, we simply can’t be. We were doing all we could to show up, and it felt like SO not enough to anyone else.
We’re the kind of people who want to do life with our kids and see them as complete human beings from the moment they were born. We don’t leave them behind to go have fun; we bring them along and enjoy life as a family. I know that’s quite antithetical to popular millennial/gen-Z attitudes towards children at the moment, but those are our values. Why on earth would I have kids, if I was always itching to drop them off at daycare or Grandma’s and get on with my life? Having children is a privilege, not a chore. And they’re only little for such a short time.
The accident set us on a path towards different values and a different life, more than eight years ago now. And what a wonderful life we’re creating for ourselves! I have no regrets about starting our family at 23. (Sometimes I tell Eric I’d have ten kids if we could–I don’t think I could handle that many, of course, but I just adore raising them.) But in returning to a past life for a bit, it became so clear how far we now stand from people who were once so close to us.
And it’s all of our choices, and no one is at fault… it’s just how it is.
It’s bittersweet to realize that like my parents’ divorce, like the Accident, having a child was one of those point-of-no-return moments in my life. And many relationships won’t pass the test to carry with me into this new chapter. Letting go is difficult, but having limited time and energy in this stage especially, means that it needs to be reserved for new relationships in which we mutually fill each other’s cups.
I know it’s much more fun to declutter my closet, but I would be neglecting a very important part of life if I didn’t touch on this aspect of creating margin, too.
xx Claire