Ron Chapple Stock
For many years, I enjoyed an annual calendar-buying ritual. I would order several Mom's Family Calendars and distribute them as gifts to my girlfriends with kids.
I loved the calendars for their simple and brilliant innovation. For every day, there were five columns, enough for every person in the family. It gave everyone the time and space to be both themselves and family members. A lovely metaphor of what I believed family was for.
There was a big, fat marker attached to the calendar with a fragile ribbon. I would merrily mark what everyone was up to every day of the month, every season of the year. School holidays, parent-teacher meetings, the constant work trips and travel, dinner parties, birthdays and theatre filled the pages to bursting. The calendar gave me an overview of where everyone was, and a reassuring sense of control over it all.
Then my beloved eldest son went off to college, and suddenly there was an empty column on the calendar. We could only mark what we knew of his whereabouts, limited to his occasional visits back from the side of the globe he'd chosen as his intellectual home. Otherwise, that column stayed eerily empty.
That precipitated the whole calendar reorganization. Mom, and the indelible ink with which she confidently blackened the contours of her life, morphed one New Year's Day when I decided I had to redefine the column headings. More precisely, I wanted to change the name next to mine, and announced to my husband that I was removing myself from the reach of his wall calendar's pen.
I reached out to an old friend, inviting him into my calendar, behind my walls.
It took us quite some time to figure out how to get our calendars – and our lives – to intertwine. My column went crazy, stretched between global travel for work and split between new love in London and my daughter in Paris.
My new apartment had its own Mom's Family Calendar, but my daughter soon announced she didn't want to figure in it – at least not every day, every season. She refused to split residences between my ex and me, and stayed with him, angry that I had not waited the three additional calendars until she was in college.
I began to use pencil on the calendar, marking the days she said she would come for dinner, to accommodate her changing the date, or not showing up. In a delicate dance with my very headstrong and determined progeny (everyone says 'I wonder where she got that'), I knew that there was no way to fit her into my calendar against her wishes.
So I moved back into hers.
My ex asked me for one of my Mom's Calendars, as we were all struggling to adapt to a new life and its familiar frame was comforting. I thought I would be free of his calendar's claustrophobic columns, except that the MOM column is labelled in large pre-printed letters. Another apt metaphor illustrating that, even when moms walk, they are still present in everyone else's consciousness.
Just as well, as I soon returned in a more than metaphorical capacity. Now I co-parent in our family home with the help of the calendar. My column is a mirror image of my ex's; I am present when he is away, and our daughter now can see where we both are on the kitchen wall. I think she feels more in control of her column, and mine. And I write in pencil, because I acknowledge this calendar is no longer mine to fill.
Now, with another calendar-purchasing season behind me, I have just successfully merged my online agenda with my new love's, in a constantly-updating connection, as we have merged souls in the same way.
He knows where I am every day, and every season, in a way I have never experienced. He sees me mourn my lost columns, and we experiment with a whole new mapping of time. This shift allows me to be lost, and know that I will be found.
I am learning to embrace the pencil approach. It makes me cede control, allows others to edit my time. It keeps me flexible, to respond to the now totally unpredictable needs of my teenage daughter, my aging mom, my peripatetic son. I will change anything, any time, for any one of them.
It makes life considerably lighter, and impossible to plan in ink. The ties that bind are now all, almost simultaneously, demanding to be let go, which takes love of an entirely different kind.
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is a Canadian who divides her time between Paris and London.