Sat Nov 07 2009
Things change. Not always for the better, not necessarily for the worse. We don't get much choice about it.
The question is not which we'd like better -- the old way or the new -- but how we can make the best of what we've got.
My parents divorced when I was 2, and my mother soon remarried. That was in the '50s, the so-called "Happy Days," when divorce was unheard of among nice folks like Lucy and Ricky or Ozzie and Harriet.
I remember turning in my report card for the first time in a new school, and having the teacher ask me in front of the class who had signed it.
"My mother," I said.
"Why is her name different from yours?" she asked.
"Because," I said, "she and my daddy got a divorce. And if that wasn't bad enough, she had to go and marry my stepdad."
Judging by the look on her face and the gasps from my classmates, you'd have thought I had said, "Because we come from a galaxy far, far away, where all parents and children have different last names, and it doesn't matter to anybody, except to people who don't matter, and if we don't like our teachers, we eat them."
Not that I would ever say that.
Growing up, I was the only child I knew with a stepfather. There were others, no doubt, but we never met. If we had, we'd have been best friends.
Some 20 years later, when my first child entered kindergarten, he came home one day with an interesting question.
"Mom, do I have a stepdad?"
"Of course not," I said. "Why would you ask that?"
"Because," he said, "all the other kids have stepdads."
Or so it seemed to him. Just that quickly, in one generation, things changed profoundly.
My stepfather didn't plan to be a social pioneer. He just saw my mother alone on her own, trying to raise two little girls and a blind baby boy.
And love, well, you know how it is -- it changes everything.
I had nothing much to hold against him except the fact that he wasn't my father. But I held it for a long, stubborn time. And life kept ticking away.
It always does, doesn't it?
We finally made our peace in the last years of his life, became good friends, he and I. In the end, we made the best of it. I only wish we'd done so sooner.
On Father's Day, and other days, too, I miss him as much as I miss my dad.
Imagine my surprise when my children ended up, like me, with a stepfather. They were in their late teens to early 20s when their dad died of cancer. I had no plans to remarry.
Those plans changed four years ago when I realized that sometimes, if we're lucky, love gives us a second chance.
One of the best gifts of my life has been the chance to get to be friends with my husband's boys, and to see him become friends with my children.
I thought of that recently when my kids came to visit. I looked up and saw my husband head-to-head over a guitar with my youngest, who had asked that he teach him the chords of a song -- not just any song, but one my husband had written.
It brought to mind a memory from some 20 years ago of that same boy leaning over another guitar, learning the chords of a different song from his dad.
Some moments in life are unbearably beautiful. This, for me, was one of those.
Things change, whether we like it or not, if only to remind us that we are still alive. It's not a question of which is better, the old way or the new. Lucky for us, by the grace of God, the heart has enough room for both.
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