Experiencing a Life Transition

It is the season of endings and beginnings. Daylights savings time, spring, and baseball are all here. Basketball season is over. 

For this University City resident, that thought is loaded this year. As a fifteen-year veteran of the “soccer mom syndrome,”--in my case the basketball, swimming, and equestrian mom syndrome--I found myself adrift when my son’s North Mecklenburg varsity basketball season closed down. Where would my husband and I go on Tuesday and Friday nights? 

What could be our excuse for a dusty home and a weed patched lawn? In those thoughts was the larger issue, what will we do when our third of three children goes off to college next year, and there are no more games to attend?

I try not to live my life as a cliché, but I’ve found myself stuck right in the middle of one. With only one more year to go to games, I wonder who am I going to be and what I will do when there are no more basketball runs. 

I am excited about having more time for my husband, fiction writing, and native North Carolina gardening. I’ve begun to volunteer more, and I already spend a good deal of time dedicated to my job. We will certainly go to some North Mecklenburg home games even when my son is no longer playing there, but life will be different. 

Ahead is how this home will feel without the nothing-like-it intensity of packs of teenage boys and girls chatting, singing along to music, eating more food than seems humanly possible, and making the kind of noise that only adolescents have down to an art. 

On the other hand, quiet is a remarkable entity that will exist in this home in the near future. There’s also the fact that I teach at a college. I never lack the energy and exuberance of adolescents in my life. 

In a recent article in the Charlotte Observer entitled, “Cancer Doesn’t Stop Most Patients From Living,” Dr. Gary Frenette states, “Attitude is 90% of how you’re going to do…Sometimes, it’s a blessing to know you’re terminal. People make decisions about how to live. They take the time to do the things that are important.”

I’m certainly not equating having your children leave home to terminal cancer. Watching children grow up is a remarkable thing, particularly if they make plans to go to college or other life enhancing places. However, the comment about being positive and making decisions about how to live life arises at the intersection of every ending and beginning. 

As our family makes its transition, I hope we will bring a good attitude and conscious planning to our next stages. As every coach says, “Where there is one game, there is always another.”