Everything Changes

We have been in our new digs for 3 ½ weeks and are reasonably quite settled. However, being grounded materially (i.e., our things have found their places and we no longer start to drive north to Croydon Rd when we are heading home) is not quite the same as being grounded internally. When we arrived at our rented condo in Puerto Vallarta last December it took about three weeks for both of us to feel fully settled within ourselves and within the building and the neighbourhood, even though we are very familiar with PV. We hadn’t quite reached that space of knowing where we were and where everything else was without having to reflect upon it. Our environment had to become internalized in a way that allowed for a deeper settling within it and within ourselves.

Finding that space will, I believe, take longer in this setting. We know the Annex area from extensive periods of living here but it feels like we are experiencing it from an entirely different angle. It was seven years ago that we moved up to the Cedervale community to accommodate living together with (though in separate apartments) Catherine and her two young children: Theoren, age 8, and Emily, age 6. Previous to that move we had been involved in their lives in an almost daily manner, right from the time Theoren was born in 1998. A year or so before the move to Croydon, Elizabeth came from Vancouver with Billie (age 1 ½) in tow, and they had become a regular part of our weekly lives as well. During that seven year period there have been major changes for all of us, the impact of which I am now experiencing as we settle into our home on Major.

When we moved to Croydon, Mark and I were what I would call “young seniors,” fully active in our professions and with our young families. We are now at quite a different stage of our lives. I have gradually morphed into a condition of semi-retirement, consistent with long periods away from Toronto. Mark, who always spoke of his desire to work, like his hero Frank Lloyd Wright, into his nineties, has also begun to mellow, acknowledging to me the other day that he was beginning to feel lazy. I saw this as a positive development. We now have more time but our grandchildren, once a big component of our focus both in Toronto and at our year-round cottage in Orillia, have also move on to different locations and stages.

Three years ago Catherine moved from Croydon to a house that she purchased in the junction area. Last September she rented out her place to three young women and moved her brood to Jackson’s Point on the southern side of Lake Simcoe. The kids go to school there during the week and on the weekends come to Toronto to be with Eli, their father, and especially with their vast clan of cousins on his side. Now 13 and 15, their interests and needs are no longer ones easily satisfied by grandparents. Besides, their parents no longer need us to care for the kids while they work or socialize. It’s a completely new landscape. Elizabeth and Billie have also moved north, to Barrie, now sharing a house there with Elizabeth’s fellow, Al. Elizabeth will be coming to Toronto one or two days a week to see a few clients in her role as an addictions counsellor. She is using my office here so I will get to see her fairly regularly. But, the family dinners and the sleep overs seem now to be a thing of the past – at least until we are able to find new patterns within these changed realities. Clearly I am experiencing the quandary of the empty-nester grandparent. I’m still here but where have you gone???

So it’s not just a new home but new ways of being that we are coming to terms with. The apartment is terrific; the location could hardly be better; but now the challenge, perhaps particularly for me is to find new and satisfying places in which to expend my time and energy. I’ve made a couple of new friends and I’ve joined the JCC. Other connections will follow I know, even, I hope different levels of connection with our rapidly changing adolescent grandchildren.