Can You Go Home Again?

[copied from dland]

**In 17 days I will be 50 years old**

Younger Daughter says that since she left for college this past September, all our family traditions have changed. This is as much as she can currently understand of that same thing we all go through: we grow up, we are no longer children, our parents can no longer fix everything, and the home of our childhood becomes a memory. Even if we still live there, it feels different.

Our house is different; a few days after she went away, we had vinyl siding put up, new windows put in, the vestibule-front porch demolished and rebuilt without the vestibule, and took out the dead shrubs. So the house does look different. But that's not what she said. She said that our family traditions are gone.

True, we didn't have our annual "Birthday Sunday" in September, when my in-laws celebrate the birthdays of their two children and one son-in-law. (My birthday, as we all know, is in January.) With three of the four grandchildren away at college this year, there was no day in September available. We agreed that starting next year, Birthday Sunday would become Anniversary Sunday, celebrated in July. One tradition down.

We've never missed a Christmas with the in-laws, until today. Now that they're an hour and a half drive away, snow matters, and boy did it snow today. We're nearing a foot, and my sister-in-law, almost an hour north of us, has got to have lots more. So, for my kids, even though they're grown up, it's the first Christmas without Nannie and Gramps. Second tradition down.

What else could she have meant? We had Thanksgiving at my father's, just like we did last year. We ate all the same food, and welcomed the addition of my nephew's wonderful girlfriend to the dinner table. Young Daughter didn't even mention Thanksgiving; she just said "all our family traditions." So she must have meant Thanksgiving, too.

We didn't lose our Thanksgiving tradition, it just changed. No Shirl this year. So it was her first Thanksgiving without Grandma.

I know she was cranky today because she feels like her childhood is slipping away. It is. They do that. They're supposed to.

She'll get over it. I just wish she didn't have to go back to school for the spring semester three days before my birthday.


ENTRY #33