People want change … until they get it.
Ask Barack Obama.
It has been a month of change in the Kennedy household. My 3-year-old son is changing day cares, my 8-year-old son is changing schools, my wife is changing jobs and I’ve got new bosses at work (which can feel like changing jobs).
This change is tame compared to families dealing with the stress of job loss, serious illness or wartime separation. I get that. Still, my family has been a bit unsettled, like a kitchen table with one short leg.
Change is hardest on my 3-year-old son, who wakes up each morning with his bottom lip jutting out. I try to distract him with microwave pancakes and episodes of “Fireman Sam,” but he is struggling.
“Daddy, I don’t want to go to school,” he says, real tears forming in the corners of his eyes. The teachers at his new preschool have been great, but he still feels attached to his old day-care family.
My older son, meanwhile, has been unusually quiet this summer at he prepared to enter third grade last week at a new school. I suspect he is secretly edgy about classwork, wondering if he’ll measure up.
My wife, a first-grade teacher, has buried any worry she has about changing schools under a mountain of work. She has painted shelves, hung curtains and organized books all summer.
As for me, I always feel like getting a new bosses calls for a period of watchful waiting. You have to figure out how the gears of your best work line up with the goals of your new leader. It takes time.
I always know that my family is at a turning point when we share a big laugh. Last Saturday, on the way home from a trip to the mall, my 3-year-old son pointed to the purple horizon as we crested the Ridge cut on I-75.
“Pretty,” my younger son said. “Look at the sun.”
“Purple mountain majesty,” my wife mused in a rare lyrical moment that I found hysterical.
“Raise your hand if you see any amber waves of grain,” I quipped.
“Hush,” my wife said, punching my shoulder.
“Oh, look guys,” I said, “Over there. If I’m not mistaken that’s a fruited plain.”
We laughed together. We relaxed. The cramps of shared worry began to release.
The next day, my 3-year-old saw some of his day-care friends at a community swimming pool. They offered to share toys, a green frog and a plastic whale. He smiled at me for the first time in days.
One of my 8-year-old son’s future classmates invited him over for a play day on the eve of his first full day of school. It was a thoughtful gesture that put him at ease.
I delivered a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of Mountain Dew to my wife on the day before school started. She gave me the same smile that charmed me on our first date.
There was unbridled laughter in the newsroom last week, a reminder that journalism is a joyful craft practiced by smart, funny people.
I’m feeling better now.
In Sunday school last week, someone observed that people of faith don’t talk much about heaven. (It’s that change thing, again.)
Even paradise, it turns out, involves relocating.
E-mail Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com.