Showing all posts tagged Ava

In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships, University, Writing

Fall 2022 Retrospective

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

I can’t believe I haven’t written a post since early September. Once my semester started, I felt like I had no time or energy to come up for air and think about anything that wasn’t my coursework or my thesis revisions. But a lot of things happened, both externally and internally, and every time I sat down to write a new post for January I lost my train of thought, so I thought I would go back and do a brief retrospective.

It took me a long time to adjust to Ava going to university. She was loving her classes, making new friends, getting fabulous grades and overall thriving in her first three months as a theatre student. I couldn’t believe how different our family seemed with one less person here. Ava’s absence made me keenly aware of the concept of negative space – noticing and appreciating what isn’t there and how it forms and shapes your experience as much as who and what is actually there.

I started to realize that without her, I felt lonely as the sole woman in a house with two males. I wrote about this, in my Creative Nonfiction grad class, but I was attempting to understand something as I was living it out, which is always a challenge. It’s better to let some time pass, so you can see the contours of the thing with more clarity. I’m slowly getting there, but the key takeaway here is that I learned to voice what I need from Jason and from William. I practiced saying, “This is not enough for me. I need more connection, more interaction, more depth of meaning in our relationships.”

Saying that was like flying for me. It was exhilarating. I felt untethered, free, unafraid to lean into the hard conversations in a way that was new and significant. I asked for and expected others to change for me, instead of me bending into awkward relational shapes for others as I’ve done for most of my life. Something about this process opened me up. It shook my systems, disrupting old patterns, making things strained for a time but ultimately helped me to change in a profound and lasting manner.

A favourite meme that I looked at while writing my thesis this summer says, “Some things break your heart but fix your vision.” That was my fall 2022. My heart cracked but then healed, and now I’m different. I also got hit by a truck (literally) in late November. I was at a dead stop at a light, when a tandem semi-trailer truck rolled back and hit me. Hard. My neck and back got all screwed up, not to mention my beautiful pristine Rav 4 which has never had a scratch on her until this collision.

Thankfully, I’m better now with some chiro, massage and physio appointments, and my vehicle will be fixed, but in the aftermath of the accident I realized something with a newfound clarity. You can do everything right, like sitting quietly in a turn lane waiting for the light to change, and still get hit. As hard as I try, I cannot see around every corner to plan for every possible scenario. I’m tired of wasting energy on that shit.

I turned 50 in December, and I feel like I’m just getting started. I’m determined to stop trying for hospital corners. It’s time to invite more emotional mess. To stop asking for permission outside of myself. I’m longing for openness, meaning, depth, fun, laughter, adventure. Being afraid and careful got me to this point. So did doing a lot of people’s inner work for them (or at least trying to). That’s over now. Some things break your heart but fix your vision, and I’m so grateful to be able to see with more clarity as I tackle a new decade of my life.

In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships, Uncategorized, University

Changes

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

I’ve always loved the beginning of September. Cooler weather, trees beginning to prepare for the upcoming dormancy of winter, back-to-school excitement in the air. It’s a time of fresh possibility and change.

I’m usually invigorated by it. But this year, I find myself mourning in a way I hadn’t anticipated. We took Ava to university on the long weekend, settling her into her new dorm experience at the University of Victoria. She deferred her acceptance last year when a housing shortage meant she couldn’t live on campus for her first year, so we had bonus time with her.

I knew I would miss her, but like everything in life, we don’t really know what we haven’t experienced yet. I worked with a counsellor, starting when Ava was in grade twelve, and she helped me with some excellent preparatory strategies for a child moving out, but the sadness still hit me with a ton of bricks on Sunday night when we hugged goodbye.

I cried. She cried. Her roommate began crying. Her roommate’s mom cried. Every woman in that tiny dorm room was crying. I knew she was going to be fine. I believed wholeheartedly that Ava was right where she was meant to be, and that once the initial rocky goodbye was behind us, she would find her footing and begin to thrive at university.

All of this has happened, and yet I still feel utterly bereft. I reached out to a few of my friends who have walked this road ahead of me, and it helps to know they all felt the same. Thrilled for their children, and proud as punch, but also undeniably grieving the loss of that child in their home in an everyday way.

The surprise for me has come in the way our family functions. Taking one person out of a four person equation means everyone has to adjust and change. I’ve realized now how much I enjoyed chatting with Ava, about everything and nothing all at once. How much we laughed at similar things. I never really noticed how our two-way relationship functioned until it disappeared. And now I really miss it.

Once her classes started on Wednesday, she’s called to tell me all about her new profs, and the friends she’s making, and what’s good and what’s not in the cafeteria. She sounds bright and happy, which is a wonderful thing. I know that we’ll all find our way through this change. It will take time. I also know that when she comes home at Thanksgiving, she’ll be a different person than the one we said goodbye to in early September.

This is the natural order of things. As parents, we take a dependent baby and turn them slowly into an independent adult. It’s an honour to see them coming into their own unique identity, and finding their way as young adults. But it’s also okay to admit that this change is hard on the parents. It leaves you adrift for a little while. I’m trying to be gentle with myself. She hasn’t even been gone a full week yet. It helps to know how other moms navigated these choppy waters.

My counsellor is amazing at reminding me to think about my coping strategies in other turbulent times. However I made it through before, is how I’ll make it through again. This really helps me. It’s healthy to love someone so much that their absence leaves a gaping hole. Like all pain, the only way out is ever through. One foot in front of the other. One day where you cry less than the day before. We are messy humans, having a messy human experience, and navigating key life changes will always be challenging.

But the good news is that we’ve made it through before, which means we have the skills required to make it through again.

In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Relationships

So Much to Celebrate

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on
So Much to Celebrate

My daughter Ava is turning 14 and like most parents, I’m feeling nostalgic. It’s so easy to get lost in the memories of her big baby grin, how cute she looked in white Osh Kosh baby shoes and a pink-and-white striped dress, or fresh from a bath, snuggly and warm in her fuzzy footy sleepers.

All of these memories are good, but nostalgia is a fairly useless exercise. When we wallow too much in it, we miss what is right in front of us. A 14 year old is a radically different creature from an infant, or the eager 5 year old starting school, or the 10 year old crying about how mean some girls can be.

Ava is, of course, made up of every age she’s ever been, the way all of us are, but the job at hand is to celebrate her 14 year old self instead of pining for what’s now in the past. And there is so much to celebrate.

She was such an easy baby, toddler, young child and older child that many people said to me, “Just you wait until she’s a teenager. If they are easy when they are young, they will be a handful when they are older.” It’s not true yet and I know anything can still happen but all signs point to Ava continuing on this responsible path.

It sounds banal to say how proud I am of her, but the bottom line is that she has always made the whole mothering gig look easy for me. She is her own true self while still being generous to others. She is a fierce feminist with way more courage than I ever had in my teens to speak out about what she believes in.

Helping her reach for her acting dream has been immensely satisfying to me. I feel as if I’m picking up a thread that began to unravel in my early twenties and now Ava is sewing it into something meaningful and worthwhile. Nothing in this life is wasted. It comes back to us, when we least expect it, in a different form. It means so much to watch her find success in this beautiful pursuit of performance art.

As parents, we must continually practice letting go of our beloved children. We do not own them. They are not ours. They have their own lives and dreams and passions. We facilitate, we advise, we stay close for when they need us. But we also practice launching them into their own independence and refusing to be afraid of how it will all turn out.

Mistakes are how we grow, no matter what age and stage we are at. Learning to risk and accepting that failure is tied to success is an important part of the parenting journey. I can’t wait to see where Ava goes next. I love the person she is and is becoming and I’m proud of the relationship we’ve built.

It’s hard to wrap my brain around only having another 4 years where she will be living under our roof for sure. But the goal of parenting is to take a dependent baby and turn them into an independent adult. I feel like we are on our way to seeing this goal be a reality and that is worth celebrating.

In Identity, Parenting

Reconciling Kindness with Authenticity

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on Leave a comment

I struggle to reconcile kindness with authenticity. So often they seem like opposite ends of the spectrum.

In helping my daughter through friend issues, I feel as if authenticity is at odds with inclusion. Do I teach her to look after herself first, even if this means backing away from a friendship that tends to bring more frustration now than support? But if I also advise her to be as kind as possible, what is she supposed to do when kindness to this person means a type of sacrifice for what feels like authentic friendship for Ava?

It’s one thing to make these kinds of choices for myself, and another thing to watch my child suffer through them. William is quite naturally adept at this. He genuinely doesn’t care if someone wants to be his friend or not. He decides for himself who his friends are (it’s a small number of people) and doesn’t feel obligated to extend friendship to everyone. Part of this might be that he is a boy. Or it could be his introverted personality, where he’s just as happy to be alone as with peers.

Reconciling Kindness with AuthenticityBut Ava is different. She’s extroverted, socially aware of how she fits into any particular group, and she’s in middle school, a place where belonging can be be a blood sport. I love that she feels ready to make certain decisions about her social life and is willing to accept the consequences of these choices. I think my fear enters in when I start worrying about how other people might perceive her if she stands up for herself when it comes to defining her friends.

I’ve lived through these friend choices and felt the pain of being labelled disloyal, cruel and full of myself. Over time, however, the anger fades away, along with the shame, and I’m left with a tighter, more intimate handful of friends whom I can trust. I had to prune away the negative in order to make room for the positive to grow and flourish. And my life is richer for it.

I want this for Ava, but I have to make my way through my own reservations and private anxieties to get there. It’s one thing to endure scorn and derision from others for yourself, and another to help your child through the same thing. When I talked to a friend about this, wondering aloud if Ava should stay quiet and not risk offending this girl or her entire circle of friends, my friend said, “It sounds like a leadership quality to not need a huge group of friends. Just one or two that you can really count on.”

This helped to soothe my fears for Ava. Perhaps kindness and authenticity can be reasonable bedfellows after all, but it comes down to listening to our intuition. When we feel like we’ve had enough, and we aren’t willing to endure a difficult situation a moment longer, then we honour our authentic self by communicating this with as much kindness as possible. Until that point, we watch and we wait, holding our tongue, which is also a form of kindness and generosity.

At the end of the day, it’s critically important to know that we all have choices. We are not stuck in painful situations. We must do what we believe to be right for us, and then learn to live with the consequences of our decisions.