Unintended Transitions

Safe Harbor Pathways was created to explore life transitions. Having experienced many obvious life transitions, including career, family, disability and aging transitions, I am now realizing that transitions occur when they are unintended or when they are unexpected. I am referring to the transitions that we experience within our families as parents become grandparents and children become adolescents and adults. As families navigate the pathways that occur through the passage of time, the parent provides a variety of lessons, each for which thought, love and connection are required.

Examples of these lessons are:

• Physical and emotional safety
• Education
• Physical and emotional nourishment
• Shared experiences
• Skills development including life skills and social skills
• Reassurance and validation
• Encouragement
• Advocacy
• Modeling  behavior (kindness, responsibility and respect)
• Discipline
• Moral and ethical development
• Identity and self-concept formation
• Cultural and community orientation
• Future preparation
• Autonomy and independence

In each phase of life from childhood to middle-age, parents experience changes in the resonance of their relationship with their children. As time passes and children grow from infants to mature adults, parents experience a continual change in what is required of them through the stages of their children’s growth and maturity phases. The primary changes involve types of connection and frequency of connection. As children grow, the parent-child relationship transifions from “hands-on” parenting to friendship that eventually is peer-to-peer friendship. Through the course of the evolution from parent to friend, another change occurs. The parent and the child/adolescent/adult relationship naturally becomes less frequent.

When these parent-child/adult relationship phases occurred, I experienced a need to adjust my expectations with regard to the relationship changes as my children sailed into adulthood (It occurred much too quickly). I found that I was needed less frequently and, when I was needed, the conversations revolved around advice or considerations rather than “father knows best”. As these phases occurred over time, I began to wonder how much my children needed me because we communicated less. When these emotions began to occur for me with regularity, I told myself to stop, back up, and take a look at what was causing these emotional rip tides and how I could fix them.

Ah…realization! My concerns about being needed less became self-congratulations when I realized that my children have progressed exactly as I always wanted them to progress. They have become older and wizened by producing and raising their own children, creating and managing their own careers and facing life’s challenges with the capacity to adapt and overcome those challenges within the context of their own maturity and experiences. Through the course of our lives together, we each have learned that growth means transitions in our relationship.

Having lived to the ripe old age of “elderhood”, I now realize that, through all of the changes that have occurred and will, in the future, occur, there remains one constant that ties together our mutual life long connection. That constant is love. It has always existed and is now, if possible, even stronger because we are always there for each other, regardless of distance, passing time, and communication frequency. I have found that my life with my family is very much like a river. As we navigate the twists and turns in the river, the scenery constantly changes, but the current that remains thoughout our journey together is  presence and love.

bill@safeharborpathways.com