Change starts with 2-degree shifts

After 20 years, my family is reordering. My kids have “flown the nest”—one as far west as possible and one as far south as possible. Transitioning from a “hands on” to a “hands off” parent was expected. I wasn’t entirely prepared for how it would feel. The “nest is empty” but I am still a parent and know that my kids still need me. The landscape has changed, however, it is doubtful that they will ever live full time in our home again or that they will ever need me in the capacity they used to. With my extra free time, I have had more than a few moments to contemplate the last 20 years of parenting. In fact, I find myself doing quite a bit of reviewing and I’ve contemplated the entire 54 years of my life. With reviews come ratings and if I had to rate my performance, I believe my grades would be mixed – everything from A‘s to D’s.

After I graduated law school, I moved to New York. After attending law school and passing the Michigan Bar exam, I realized just how little I wanted to be an attorney. Even though my previous summers internship for the Assistant Attorney General for the State of New of York was truly exciting and my law school job clerking for a firm that represented the City of Detroit was also very thrilling, it seemed to me that after a while most attorneys became quite jaded with the legal profession and the practice of law. So, I decided to pursue my passion – ACTING! One week after graduating law school, I packed my stuff and moved to Manhattan to study acting at the Lee Strausberg Theater Institute.

After my mother stopped drinking and started AA, she was recommended a program in South Dakota called Onsite that could help her unlock the root causes of some of her behavioral patterning and offer her tools to remain on the path of sobriety. It worked. She was sober 35 years before she passed.

My mother attended a number of programs at Onsite before I decided, in my 20’s, to attend a program called “Learning to Love yourself.”