Maria

The worst part was the trunk. As my friend Kyle and I stared at the monstrosity protruding out of it, the lid came crashing down. The object continued to stick out, defiantly proving that it couldn’t be scratched by even falling trunk lids. I turned my face away so Kyle wouldn’t see my tears, moved the monstrosity to the back seat and drove away.

I had bought my car during the height of my independence. I knew I wanted a convertible to take advantage of the beautiful seasons that graced the Washington DC area each year. I researched and then found one on Craigslist for sale by a bartender in the district. I remember I took three different men to come look at it with me before I took the plunge. When I turned it on that first day after taking ownership, the Brooks and Dunn song “Maria” was playing and it immediately became its name. The car has been good to me. It gave me the pickup I needed to regularly navigate DC traffic, had a strong sound system that allowed my 80’s music to compete with any rap I encountered, and had just enough body “character” that it wasn’t a problem to add a few parking scratches here and there. The car had been with me through hookups, break ups, and eventually a full “Just Married” makeover. It had driven around countless peop

le including missionaries, hitchhikers, families, diplomats, and once thirteen drunks at 3 AM (luckily that was only a two mile adventure).

It was leant out to some fellow BYU students to use as transportation from DC to Utah and was inexplicably returned to me with an extra 15,000 miles on it. It mattered little, though, as now it only gets driven on Fridays for a weekly trip to the grocery store and an occasional group meeting. It always had some quirks like the RPM monitor and odometer which both work but won’t display anything except when I’m driving past the hidden NSA building north of DC on I-95. It has aged over the past six years and 70,000 miles though. Since purchase it has had all tires replaced four times, three new batteries, two new belts and a new “the car door is open so I will ding incessantly” sensor. Each month it has more and more issues as Chryslers are not known for being great cars after 100,000 miles. I didn’t care though. I didn’t care that I was becoming good friends with the AutoZone guy in Provo. It wasn’t a big deal that the three major dents (only one created while I was driving) were starting to attract stares. I could even deal with the fact that neither door nor the trunk would stay open on their own anymore. But at that moment at Kyle and Erika’s house, as we tried to force their hand-me-down stroller into my clearly too small trunk, I realized

that I might have encountered the last straw. This baby is going to change my life, and I couldn’t deny it any longer.

It’s not that I’m not excited to become a mother. I am. Baby was, in a sense, planned. But he was planned for a delivery date of April 2012, not April 2011. Even so, we didn’t want to wait very long to start our family since we both want a large one. We are happy to bring the first son in his generation to both sides of the family, but I’m still getting used to the idea. I realize now why God gave us nine months gestations. It is so both the baby and the family and grow into the new plan! On some level, I feel like I am getting gypped of my last year of life. Baby is bringing an ending to our lives as we know it, and frankly, it’s terrifying.

When I graduated from undergrad in 2004, I moved to Washington DC inaugurating the best five years of my life. I had close friends in the LDS singles scene, a great job, and the most wonderful on- again-off-again boyfriend. We dated for four and a half years before we got married and even after we did so, we regularly spent our free time with our single friends. DC was a never ending spigot of interesting activities as well as a fountain of ideas to evaluate and discover. I often said that DC and I were like fitting a square in a square. Throughout it all, my car provided the perfect embodiment of excitement, narcissism, and freedom. Even marriage, which is often viewed as a monumental transition, was navigated easily by us since we had four years to get used to the idea and we didn’t lose our friends in the process.

But a child, a child changes our whole existence.

Each transition starts with an ending, continues with a neutral zone and ends with a beginning. I have literally been working through the stages of grief in relation to this ending for the past five months. I stayed in denial that my life was in transition for a long time. After all, my life hardly changed when we got married. Anger came next, with me walking around singing “Freedom” by George Michael which has always been the theme song to my car and life in DC. It continued into bargaining evidenced by the attempt Scottie and I made to convince his family that we could still accompany them to Ireland- with three week old Baby. That moment with Kyle’s stroller in my trunk was the moment I crossed into depression.

In William Bridges’ Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes, he states “The ending was not only real but important to understand and appreciate. Ending involves a symbolic death." I knew that my life as a carefree, convertible owning young adult was officially ending, but I wasn’t sure how to let it end. Regarding the needed change, Bridges goes on to say “Whatever it is, it’s internal. The transition itself begins with letting go of… some way you’ve always been or seen yourself... the inner ending is what initiates the transition." As I pondered these ideas, I found myself slowly moving through the final stage of grief- acceptance- and officially into the neutral zone.

It’s interesting because as a woman, I am used to discussing my feelings in order to bring meaning to them. This has been an odd situation, though. My mother says I will immediately fall in love with Baby when I see him, just like she did. Scottie, who never gets concerned over anything, is happy and thinks everything will be fine. I find myself more than a little bewildered at the range of emotions I feel daily. Bridges states “The first of the neutral zone activities of functions is surrender- one must give in to the emptiness and stop struggling to escape it. That is not easy, although it is made easier by an understanding of why the emptiness is essential. The process of transformation is essentially more of a death and rebirth process than one of mechanical modification. The neutral zone provides access to an angle of vision on life that one can get nowhere else. And it is a succession of such views over a lifetime that produces wisdom.”

This quote I find to be especially difficult for me to embrace. I have trouble disconnecting from the all-encompassing MBA world. It is a reality that is simultaneously consuming and comfortable for me. I continue to choose that to be my reality. Also as a coping mechanism during my navigation of this neutral zone, I am reading various parenting books (and the Wall Street Journal’s Tiger Mom saga) voraciously. My type A personality tells me that if I must endure this part of the transition, the best way is to prepare as much as possible for the new beginning. On one hand, I still believe this to be logical.

I know that after time, I will eventually cross into the new beginnings stage. Of this, Bridges reminds me “Psychologically, the process of return brings us back to ourselves and involves a reintegration of our new identity with elements of our old one. This connection is necessary if we are going to be grounded and not “up in the clouds”. This aspect of the beginning is as natural as the disintegration was back in the termination phase. Inwardly and outwardly, one comes home. As a wonderful Zen saying expresses it, ‘After enlightenment, the laundry’.” I am unsure as to when I will pass into the realm of Beginning. Maybe it will be when Baby arrives, maybe earlier or later. I look forward to that day when I will feel comfortable in my skin as not only a fun LDS Italian MBA student but as a mother as well. I just hope that my car will be able to make the transition with me- with or without the trunk space for a stroller.