I feel the winds of change blowing …

"I feel the winds of change blowing". I've said that many times in my life. And each time, it was true ... change was coming. Was it coming and I felt it, or did I want it so I made it. Who knows. But I feel the winds of change blowing.

We are at an interesting juncture in life, that place where you are racing toward the "empty nest." Many have been there. You know it is a road traveled by every parent in every generation since Adam and Eve sent their young men out into the world. Well, we know how that turned out. None-the-less, here we go. The catch ... there's a little chirping sound coming from the nest, coming from the mouth of the next generation of children from our family. I truly feel like we have two generations of children, separate yet united as brothers. That's what happens when you have two teenagers and a 1st grader. The winds of change ...

Then there's the dream of a different life. I don't want to seem to be trying to get the older two out the door. Honestly, I'm not sure how you breathe when a big piece of your heart moves on to the rest of his life, much less when it happens twice in two years. But with their childhoods coming to an end, we get the chance to see how it worked. We get to evaluate the successes, the failures, the complications, and the joys that define their childhoods, and then we get to decide how to do it better in round two.

There are so many pieces to evaluate. The older two have had a typical suburban childhood ... public school, suburban neighborhoods, soccer teams, music lessons, boy scouts. Just like my childhood. Just like the childhood of everyone I've ever known (mostly). What does it look like to break out of that mold and dare to dream? What could be different? Be better?

We've fallen for the American Dream, and it feels more like the American Nightmare. Don't misunderstand, my teens have had a great childhood, and I've loved every minute of watching them become the men they are becoming. We're not done yet, but I have a glimpse everyday of the end result. They have turned out well. But in the wake of their childhoods, I see what we parents have become.

I've been tired for years. We struggle as many do with expectations that we have set to perform based on the lives we have created ... that we pay an incredible amount in bills for this complex life, that we work to a certain level without fail and without cutting ourselves any slack, that we interact with family and friends in a certain way to be liked, that we worship God by pushing ourselves to exhaustion under entirely misdirected motivation. I don't blame others for these expectations; we have placed them on ourselves in the pursuit of the American Dream. We place expectations on ourselves to be so "normal."

It is time to stop the spinning, and get off the ride. I have realized over the last few weeks that I've been trying to escape "normal" my entire life. The winds of change ...

So David and I are pursuing a new dream. While we attempt to ignore the expectations, we are redefining our own dream. Watch out world, or at least the little bit of the world that knows us, the adventure is starting anew.