Think of a time you were facing an important change in your life. What was that change? How did you handle it? Were you ready for it, or did you want everything to stay the way it was? Explain.
This was a prompt I gave to my students a few days ago before we started reading the short story “Eveline” by James Joyce. It’s a lovely little story from Dubliners, and in the story, Eveline is an Irish girl with an abusive father who is planning on running away with her new lover, Frank, to Buenos Ayres. She sits at the window through the story, thinking about how wonderful her new life with Frank will bee, then thinking about how awful her life with her father has been, then how her life with her father wasn’t that bad, and how she promised her dying mother she would work to keep the family together. Eventually, just as Frank is boarding the boat and motioning to her to follow him, she grips the railing and decides to stay in her old life, even though she so desperately wanted to leave it just a few pages before.
Many of my students openly shared that they are facing many changes as they sit in the desks in my classroom – parents are divorcing; some students just moved here from Mexico, leaving all their friends and family behind; some just came to this school from another one; some are excited at the prospect that their fathers may come home from jail or war in the forseeable future.
However, when I asked them if they were ready for these changes or if they ever wanted to go back to their old lives, every single one of them said they were ready, that change is inevitable and wishing for it to be any other way is pointless.
Having experienced many monumental changes this past summer, with many more to come, frankly, I do not believe them.
There were days before Tim and I moved in together when I wanted to grip the railing of my mom’s house and not budge – let’s face it, there was about a month after we moved in together that I wanted to go back. Even though I was ready for cohabitation, I still wasn’t sure. I had no idea what lay ahead of me: Would it be better or worse? Wouldn’t it be easier just to stay where I was? Sometimes, isn’t the easy way the right way?
Just the other day, Tim turned to me and said: “I never thought I’d ever say this, but all I want right now is to be married.” 1 And I agreed, mostly. Marriage, right now, looks like the promised land compared to the final months of engagement and hectic wedding-planning and daily meetings to make sure everything is just so. But there is something final about marriage. Even if something happens to us or to our marriage, there’s no going back to the way things were. Ever. We have permanently changed, and permanently changed each other.
You could argue that even if we didn’t get married – even if we broke up right now or three months ago before moving in together – that we’d still be forever changed. This is true. But the slow process of a relationship unfolding is not the same change as the severe divide between married and not-married. And, sometimes, married looks a lot scarier than broken-hearted. And, sometimes, broken-hearted due to death or divorce looks a lot scarier than broken-hearted now, before we get too far into it.
In a way, my students are right: Change is inevitable. But marriage is no longer something you have to do. Sure, it’s … encouraged, shall we say?… by American society, but not demanded by it. There are many people who live their lives avoiding change – crossing over change on a tight rope and balancing for dear life, and, unlike tight rope walking, if you fall off into change, there’s no net to save you from plummeting to the ground.
But, change has its up sides, as well, and that is why we do it. Even though Eveline had no idea what her life would be like with Frank, there was a great possibility that it would be better than staying with her abusive father. Likewise, even though I have no idea how our married life will be and how it will end, there’s a good chance that I’ll be a better person for having done it, and, at the very least, I’ll always be able to say that we were happy together, and that I wasn’t about to give up the chance at true happiness, or true love, as romantic-comedy as that may sound.
Unlike Eveline, then, I’m going to get on that boat, and, like my students say, I’m not going to give up opportunities that come my way in the future because I’m too scared to make a change. And I will be supportive of changes that come Tim’s way, as well. This is my promise to myself as I move to a new chapter of my life, and to Tim as we take our vows next month. I just hope I can help myself let go of that railing.
- Before you all swoon with happiness over how sweet of a thing that is to say, you need to know that this was said in response to the past two months and the month we have ahead of us of frustrating wedding planning. ↩
This is a great post. 🙂
I’ve been thinking a lot about change recently too, but my focus has been on the forced kind of change.
A year ago I was diagnosed with endometriosis and since then my symptoms have gotten steadily worse. In just a few months, I went from being a basically healthy person to being a chronically ill one. My body has changed, but my emotional self hasn’t caught up completely yet. Every time I think I’ve got a handle on it, my brain revolts and I find myself wanting to go back.
I try to concentrate on the choices I do have–the changes I can control–but it is hard. Change in all forms can be rough!
However, when I asked them if they were ready for these changes or if they ever wanted to go back to their old lives, every single one of them said they were ready, that change is inevitable and wishing for it to be any other way is pointless.
Having experienced many monumental changes this past summer, with many more to come, frankly, I do not believe them.
Your students aren’t in your position.
You’re not only experiencing monumental changes, you are driving them as an active force. When kids’ parents are divorcing, deciding they’re “ready” for it and resigning themselves to it is often the only healthy option.