I don’t feel complimented when someone I haven’t seen for a while says, “You haven’t changed a bit.”
I prefer what I heard when my parents and I attended the annual Tschabold family reunion, “My, how you’ve grown.”
No matter what age we are, every day changes us a little bit. Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher born in 544 BSc said, “No man ever stepped in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” I’m sure that applies to women, too.
When a female goes from preschooler to student to adult worker, she changes. If she passes from single to married, to motherhood, to mother-in-law and grandmother, the new roles give her different perspectives. Even various stages of the same classification cause change–there’s a big difference between mothers of toddlers and mothers. The same when she buries her parents and she becomes an orphan instead of a daughter. Her core remains the same but each of those events causes her to grow.
While I was growing up, girls who didn’t marry in their twenties were considered old maids. They worked as executives secretaries, school teachers, nurses or moved in with a sibling and were known as the family’s maiden aunt. Today’s women have a lot more choices.
It isn’t just our personal lives that change us. What’s happening around us also influences us. Those who survive the COVID-19 pandemic will be different from what they were before our world changed.
It doesn’t have to be a traumatic moment to change a person. When I was 14 years old, I said yes when 16-year-old Kenny asked me to ride the Ferris Wheel at a carnival and it set the course of the rest of my life.
What have been some of your exceptional moments of growth?
I think we are all pretty much forced to grow or perish. I like to think I have changed or bent to accommodate the circumstances of my life. I suppose my first big change came when the little farm girl went to college at the University of Wisconsin. Very different from the way I grew up, but somehow I did well. Then marrying a career officer in the Army & living many places for 17 years demanded bending. Becoming a mother brought more change; divorce & back to Madison for my Master’s Degree with two young children in tow was big. The loss of two husbands due to cancer; more moves; etc, etc, etc. That’s been my life — constant change & I would hope growth.