Loving The Bye-Bye

The following words will destroy any coolness factor I may have: I love my mini-van. With just my thumb, I can open and close the doors and windows. It runs smooth, seats eight, and has a six-CD changer and triple-zone climate control to satiate our music preferences and inner thermostats. The only problem with it is that my daughters still love The Bye-Bye.

The Bye-Bye is our old car: a four-door sedan, the first car we ever purchased brand spanking new. Its paint is called something like "Bronzed Pewter" by the manufacturer, a fancy way of saying "Shiny Taupe". Nothing is automatic, not even the transmission. I roll down windows and unlock doors the old-fashioned way. It goes sixty miles per hour… sooner or later. After almost a decade, the air-conditioner and CD player still work, it gets forty miles to the gallon on the freeway, and it's the first car I ever owned that I didn't have to sweet-talk into starting. So I can honestly say that I have a healthy respect for The Bye-Bye. But love? Not exactly.

The girls, however, truly love The Bye-Bye. The other day, I ran a quick errand. "Want to come with me?" I asked Skyler, my second daughter.

"No thanks." She didn't even pause for a moment's thought.

That's when I dangled the worm that I knew would catch her. "I'm taking The Bye-Bye…"

She ran to get her jacket.

I understand their love. My eldest daughter, Jayna, was buckled into the backseat as we drove it off the lot. Skyler came home from the hospital in it. It traveled with us to Spain for a three-year military tour. The Bye-Bye was always there; the mini-van is just a flashy Johnny-come-lately.

It's one of those things that demonstrates how both girls love what stays the same in their lives. They are just like their mother in that way. The fastest way to send me into Panic Mode is to utter the C word: change. "What will I have to give up?" I wonder, or, "Where will this take me? Where will it send the ones I love?"

And with the omnipresence of change, it often seems that the question should no longer be, "What's new?" but, "What isn't new?" DVD players took over the VCRs that were a technological marvel in my childhood. Brangelina and TomKat have replaced Bennifer. Pink is the new black. Orange is the new pink. Thirty is the new twenty, and fifty the new thirty. Therefore, I treasure the haircut my husband has had for our entire marriage or restaurants that never omit "my usual" from their menus.

To be sure, some change is for the better. I'm thankful that women can vote and that we are edging closer to true racial and gender equality. I appreciate the enormous advances in telecommunications that allow me to be in touch daily with friends in Australia that I haven't seen in fifteen years.

But my knee-jerk reaction — honed through the years of varied locales, additions and subtractions in our lives — is to create boulders that declare, This will not be moved. Friday nights are Nacho Nights; Saturdays are for pancakes. Stories and prayers come before bedtime. Ouchies get kisses and band-aids; good grades get a dinner out. Because this is what I want my children to know wherever change takes them: that my love is for always.

Ironically -- frustratingly -- it seems to be only what I wish would change that never does. But as I witness my daughters loving The Bye-Bye even with all its flaws, I can't help but think that maybe I'm missing something. Maybe the answer isn't always fighting to keep things the same while wishing I could alter circumstances or irritating personality quirks. Maybe, sometimes, it is in accepting what I can't change, and loving wholeheartedly in spite of it, that I best demonstrate my devotion.

I still adore my minivan. But The Bye-Bye reminds me that while fads come and go, places disappear into memory, cars stop working and get replaced, love remains constant and true. As I kiss my daughters' sleeping faces at the end of each tumultuous day, I hope they know the words of my heart: my love is for always.