We are all who we choose to be but until we make peace with who we are we will never be content on our journey, and eventually the things that we want and need will start to conflict badly with the things that we already have. 

Freedom

As soon as she arrived she could sense that something was out of place. The couch, once French Provincial in design and overly formal in appearance, was now contemporary and deep navy blue in color with wide, comfy cushions, inviting enough to lounge on. She had arrived in town late and let herself in with the key from her childhood. The phone was ringing as she opened the door quietly so as not to awaken her mother. It was 11:30 at night and she wanted to shout out “Who’s calling you at this hour” but she stayed silent and in doing so, could hear her mother’s loud whispers “I can’t talk right now - my daughter’s just coming in the door - I’ll talk to you tomorrow”. She wondered who it was that her mother couldn’t talk to with her in the house, who it was who would call at 11:30 at night and was this person suitable for her mother to even be talking to?

In retrospect, the warning signs had all been there - her mother’s separation after 31 years of marriage, the new couch, the Ikea shelving units, and her fridge - now full of vitamins and energy supplements - not the roast beef leftovers, wedges of lemon meringue pie and pots of broccoli soup that she still held in her memory of her childhood. No longer was the fridge something she could look into and muse over and wonder what she wanted to eat. Now she had to wonder what was edible. But it was totally her mother’s fridge now and her mother had changed and it was something she was going to have to come to terms with.

Like many women her age, her mother had married by twenty years old because it was the right thing to do, and had raised children during her socially formative years. She was now living her twenties a little late in life and she was not alone - the newly unattached housewife was becoming common and as an adult child of one of these free-flying mothers, she was not quite certain how to deal with it all. Her frustration arose when she compared what her mother used to be with what her mother had evolved into. Her mother used to bake her own bread, sew her own clothes and watch the Young & the Restless. Now she worked in a  clothing store, went to clubs with her girlfriends, and spent hours surfing the internet and e-mailing her new friends, of whom there were many. She now hung out with women in similar situations and recently divorced and resettled men. It was a fraternity of newly single people in what seemed to be a freedom from marriage movement.

She worried that her mother was spending too much money on vitamins, yoga lessons, and weekly massages - was she no longer planning for her future?  But maybe, another part of her thought, her mother and her mother’s new friends had spent their whole lives living in the future and now just wanted to live in the present, 'be' in the moment.

She wondered, too, if this could happen to her - would she wake up one day and loathe the relationship she was in? Could she avoid it? Was it a generational thing that would have worn itself out by the time she reached her fifties?

After many discussions and silences, she and her mother agreed to have their differences. She began to realize that change was inevitable, and so decided not to be too critical of her mother, and her mother agreed to not be so defensive of her new lifestyle. 

Their relationship was still evolving - evolving out of all the preconceptions that they had had of each other. They were working on accepting each other's differences,  but her next step was going to be more than interesting when she would have to explain to her own children why their Grandma had just bought a new minivan and was going to travel across Canada with a friend  - life would  be so much simpler if Grandma just stayed home, knitted slippers, played Bingo, and had the odd glass of wine with Sunday dinner........