B is for Becoming

In our fast-paced culture where we spin from one thing to another with little thought or attention, it can be helpful to consider where we are, or were, and who we are, or were, and how we felt at the times in our lives when we could say were neither one or the other.

Shifting marital status, or changing from being treated as a child to being considered an adult, or from young woman to mother, from graduate student to credentialed professional or professor in your field, or from wife to widow are some of the common experiences in our culture that have lost the appreciation for the in-between state.

Transition is liminal. A liminal state, a transitional state, status or place, is when the way we position ourselves in life is reconfigured. We shift from being one status, which we can no longer claim, to being another, to which we do not yet belong. We walk across a threshold and we enter unknown territory.

Other cultures often treat personal transitions more explicitly than do we. We hang on to our children’s childhoods while they may have had experiences which they do not share with us that have begun their movement into adulthood. In some way our culture does not do endings well. For those of us deniers, framing an experience as what changed, and how we felt as the new stage emerged as we transitioned into it can help us begin to experience that place between. Understanding the beginning is much easier than accepting an end. This is why I suggest we start this process of examining our emergence into stages, beginnings rather than what has ceased, before we focus on what is no longer available to us. The death of an old self can be painful. Some of these include:

• Becoming a widow. It is difficult to accept we are no longer a wife when we can still catch scent of our husband when we walk into a room or open a closet.
• Another difficult transition I often think of is found in the concept of the Bardo. Becoming a soul and leaving a known humanity (dying) cannot be easy. Many earlier stage shifts in life mirror this. When we are in transition we cannot see the next stage that will begin. If we shift from focus on ending we can reframe our beginning as a blossoming, a becoming, and not be future-focused and examine the between-state.
• Becoming a mother is a huge becoming. Nature, intelligently, gives us a while to transition. If only we could always take a few months to travel between stages.

Think about your transitions. Perhaps you went through a divorce. How was the between time? We often try to forget hard times, but consider the fear you may have encountered. How did you celebrate your discoveries during this time? Did you rediscover libraries and the amazing things that are free through them? Maybe the rushing of your days relaxed and you did not have to rush home to prepare a meal, or maybe you learned to pack a picnic and go to a public space with your kids when you picked them up after school. Focus on the beginning time and how you felt, what you discovered. Was this an educational time? What did you learn.

Slow down and think about what happened between two events. Don’t just focus on the trauma of divorce, or where you are now. Evaluate all the shifting sands between then and now. Write about these sands-capes as they are some of the most important paths we walk.

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This is the second entry for this site’s participation in April 2024’s A to Z Blog Challenge. You can read about all this at my theme reveal post. Basically I am using this opportunity to write parts of a book with the working title of: Permission to Write. Each entry is intended to provide memoir writers with an open-ended prompt to elicit a complex exposition about a thing or event rather than a simple answer to prompt question.This is intended to open up the things we connect and call upon as we write.