Your Next Two Reads
One book. One article. Both worth your time this week.
In a season of freshman orientation, letting go, and 18-year-old senior summer shenanigans that will be funny (eventually, I hope), two things landed in my hands this week that stopped me where I stood.
I am not quite done living this part yet. When I get to the other side of drop-off, I will come back to the college admissions process from the beginning, like I did while we were living it, for everyone coming behind us. Including a middle schooler. We have a ways to go, baby.
First: Bruce Feiler and the idea of being homesick in your own home.
Feiler is a Georgia-born author and one of the more thoughtful voices writing about how Americans navigate change. His book A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World and How It Can Save Us opens with a scene that felt like it was written for me…like me this week. He and his wife drop their identical twin daughters at college, drive home, walk through the front door, and he is floored by something he cannot immediately name. It was not only about missing his girls. It was that everything felt unmoored at once.
He describes it as being homesick in your own home.
I saw him speak at the Atlanta History Center Sidney Isenberg Author’s Series this week, and he said that homesick is not quite the right word, he knows, but it is the only way he could explain it.
What Feiler was experiencing was what he defines as a lifequake. He defines it as a forceful burst of change that leads to a period of upheaval, transition, and renewal. On average, people experience 3 to 5 lifequakes in their lifetime, and each takes about five years to process. Not every hard thing qualifies. But some disruptions rearrange the whole architecture of your daily life, and when they do, Feiler argues, the goal is not to get back to normal. It is to build toward something new.
The word he uses is renewal. I think that is the part most of us forget to make room for.
And this is not just a book for people taking a kid to college. His research into ritual, and his finding that ritual shaped religion, not the other way around, is fascinating on its own. The rise of entirely new rituals outside of religious institutions, think Daddy-Daughter dances, promposals, gender reveals, IVF parties, divorce registries, is a genuinely new cultural phenomenon and he traces it beautifully. It is so good.
When I heard this quote from the book while I was driving my car (I'm an Audible gal) I pulled over to write it down: "The real miracles occur when you are in community. At the moment you are most in fear, you share that fear with another, and suddenly you're not alone. The wow, I think, is the hospitality of tending that fear together."
Second: A 2016 New York Times piece that is suddenly everywhere again.
Lisa Damour is a psychologist who writes about adolescent development, and this week an article she wrote nearly a decade ago started recirculating widely. I think she knew I needed it. You will too.
The piece is called “The Teenager With One Foot Out the Door.” It is about the friction and disappearing acts and low-grade irritability that often show up in the weeks between graduation and departure. Damour’s argument is that this behavior, as maddening as it can be to live with, is doing something important. It is psychologically easier to leave people you are annoyed with than people you love without reservation. The friction is protective. Your kid is not being indifferent. They are managing something enormous, and this is how they are managing it.
She also makes the observation that the teenager who is consumed with every last friend hangout is often the one who cannot yet face the full weight of leaving home. The intense focus on peers is frequently connected to how hard it is to say goodbye to family.
I found that reframe genuinely useful. It does not make the eye-rolling easier to absorb in real time. But it changes what you understand the moment to actually be about.
The article is free to read at this link and worth bookmarking for anyone with a teenager who is leaving, or who will be leaving, or who is currently making you feel like a meddlesome landlord in your own house. You will know the when to pull this one back up….
As always, I love hearing what you are reading and what is helping you along the way.