When I was younger, I assumed my family would stay the same for eternity. I grew up with these little precious routines that felt permanent.
Consistent.
Familiar.
Happy.
I still carry those golden memories around with me. Our Friday pizza nights, which never lacked our laughter. The three of us sitting on the couch, watching the same shows and repeating the same inside jokes we had heard over a hundred times now. The way we would go outside every time it rained and just sit there, together, just to appreciate the beauty of it all.
Peacefully.
Back then, little me wouldn’t have ever thought that there was a world where we’d stop doing these things. I can almost hear her w
hispering to me, “What could ever change?” But now, I know better than to think that everything stays the same. Time is like watching a sunset. You never notice how the colors morph and change when you stare at it. But when you look at it after a while, the sky is completely different. And that’s how it feels with family, too. Time blurs the changes so you don’t even see them happening. But when you look back at it, everything is different.
My parents became busier with work, often waking up early and working into the night. But the person who changed the most was me. I would notice myself spending more time out and with my friends. When I came home from school, I often rushed to my room rather than greeting my parents or helping them out with work around the house. And without even noticing, I started living more on my own.
And the thing is, it wasn’t because of an argument or anything dramatic that caused this major and dynamic shift in my life–it was slow and almost invisible. The only reason I even noticed it was because I had overheard my parents talking about our “good days.” And that’s when it hit me–little by little, the close relationship I had with my parents was slipping away.
Lately, I find myself re-living the old version of us in my brain, longing to go back in time. I’ll see a photo from years ago, or hear a song we used to sing in the car, and feel like I’ve been dragged years back, witnessing the memory right in front of me.
And just when I think that this is how things will be, separate and distant, we’ll have a night where we all sit down together, talking and laughing like nothing ever changed between us. And in those moments, I realized that our closeness had never really left; it just looks different now.
Families don’t stay fixed in time. People will grow, routines will shift, and the old versions will wilt. It’s all a pretty cycle of our life. Does this mean that you lose everything? No. It just means you have to find new ways to belong to each other.
And sometimes, that’s enough.