Sea Change
Many of us have heard the term sea change in business conversations—words used to describe a real transformation—intriguingly the expression doesn’t originally come from sailors or the sea, but from Shakespeare, who wrote in The Tempest, “Full fathom five thy father lies/Of his bones are coral made:/Those are pearls that were his eyes:/Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange.�
Last week I visited the ocean on a whirlwind trip to Boston. There was no time for a long visit but I wasn’t going to get that close without putting my feet in the water. The problem was that the beach we visited was littered with broken glass.
I don’t mean the sea glass my family used to collect at the cottage we visited when the kids were small. It sat alongside a beach that was tidal, salt water filled and emptied the beach twice a day. Someone told us that summer residents there would save their wine bottles all summer and dash them against the rocks as they left in the early autumn, knowing that by the time they returned the sharp edges of glass would have been softened. We collected handfuls of that glass that had experienced a sea change (unlike the glass on the Boston shoreline).
A sea-change “into something rich and strange� certainly describes the real transformation that happens at the start of parenthood. There, a person’s identity is cracked open and at first the edges are often jagged as the nights of unbroken sleep, the bodily changes, and the incessant demands of small people.
When my kids were very young, I grabbed at moments of solitude. I cultivated opportunities to draw inward, to be centred and quiet and still because, as Anne Morrow Lindbergh says in her book Gift from the Sea, my life was one of zerrissenheit, a German word which can be translated as torn-to-pieces-hood.
Lindbergh writes: “With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls–woman’s normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is � how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.”�
I lived a lot of years in torn-to-pieceshood and while I loved much of it, I also worked hard to have regular respite from that world.
But there was another sea change ahead. In a later edition of Gift from the Sea, Lindbergh describes it:
“The oyster bed as the tide of life ebbed…was left high and dry. A most uncomfortable stage followed, not sufficiently anticipated and barely hinted at in my book. In bleak honesty, it can only be called ‘the abandoned shell.� Plenty of solitude and a sudden panic with how to fill it characterized this period. With me, it was not simply a question of filling up the space or the time. I had many activities and even a well-established vocation to pursue. But when a mother is left, the lone hub of a wheel, with no other lives revolving about her, she faces a total re-orientation. It takes time to re-find the center of gravity.�
This is precisely the challenge facing many parents this month of the year. It comes into my play in my book, . This stage can feel like the Boston beach with its shards of broken glass, its unexpected stabs of pain.
As my kids began to leave home, I read a book about the empty nest that broke down the percentage of parental reactions. It said something like half of all parents have mixed feelings that mostly get absorbed into daily life pretty quickly, a new normal. Another 35% are elated: they’ve put plans on hold or their kids have cramped their style and now they are ready to get going. And then there were the small percentage that experienced the leaving as loss, as grief.
That was me when my kids started to leave. I was in good company, though.
Lindbergh counsels: “One has to come to terms with oneself not only in a new stage of life but in a new role. Life without children, living for oneself � the words at first ring with a hollow sound.� She writes, “We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity…�
Again, this played into my writing of Renaissance. My main character, Liz, is a new empty nester and she didn’t have the same experience of grief that I did, but she still had to figure out what next as we all do after any sea change. That’s why it isn’t just a midlife book but a book for anyone whose life feels jagged and who needs the transformation of a sea change, who needs a re-naissance.
In my next post I’ll tell the story of the very day I became a full-fledged empty nester but for now let me let Lindbergh’s words wash over you like a wave of salt water: “Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.”�
