It was cool this morning when I walked the dogs, and the driveway is lined with the flowers of transition: goldenrod and New England asters. When I came back inside, I changed the wreath on our front door from the summer version (purple silk hydrangea flowers) to the fall (twigs and berries.) I spent much of breakfast talking to my children about Labor Day, which is today: why we don’t have a Labor Day parade (I suspect it’s because school has just started up and everyone needs the weekend to rest), why Labor Day exists (to recognize the labor movement and our nation’s workers), and why tradition forbids wearing white after Labor Day (apparently because some wealthy women in the 1880s decided to make an arbitrary rule to separate “old money” people from vulgar newcomers.) 

Last week, two of my daughters and I started school: They went as students, and I returned to the classroom as a teacher for the first time in many years. This week, my three remaining children will go back to school. Given all the change that this entails — five children at five different schools (and in five different sports after school), two of those children starting at new schools, and me working full time — we are doing remarkably well. I sit here on the day that symbolizes the divide between summer and fall, and I am deeply grateful for my renewed sense of teaching as a vocation, and for this job that I love already; I am thankful that my children who have started school are happy where they are, and that my children who will begin school tomorrow are feeling ready and excited; and I am beyond fortunate to have a supportive husband and nearby grandparents who make these logistics possible! 

But there is loss and there is pain in any transition, no matter how welcome or necessary the change. I am thinking of another type of labor on this Labor Day: the labor of childbirth. The most painful stage of labor — the moment I always thought, “I can’t do this one more second!” — is called “transition.”  As excruciating as it is, transition is also the signal that the long-awaited baby is imminent. 

If you had told me one year ago that this Labor Day would find our entire family preparing to head out early the next morning for work and school, I couldn’t have wrapped my mind around that concept. I spent the first decade of our lives in Vermont gradually building a world that revolved around our house, with children to teach, gardens to tend, and animals to care for — all of which depended upon my consistent presence. It took the past three years for that beautiful vision to unravel slowly, and if you’ve been reading this column you’ve witnessed my dawning awareness, confusion…and grief. 

Grief, because I had to let go. I had to acknowledge that something that had been very good was no longer working for everyone. And the hardest part of this process was trying not to believe the voice in my head saying that the problem was me: that all the pieces of our old life would have kept working if I’d just been a little better at it all. 

I have said it before, but here is what I’d like us all to know: You are allowed to change. That may seem obvious, but it is one thing to know about the inevitability of change, and another thing entirely to live the change. 

I’m not talking about change in response to boredom, the kind of spontaneous change that gives a hit of adrenaline: I mean the change that is wrenching, that must be undertaken gradually because it involves a dismantling of systems, the kind of change that must be pondered, prayed over, and discussed. The change that can feel like something is dying.

This entire past year has been one long Labor Day for our family: Almost everything has changed in a yearlong arc of transition. There are the things you know (the schools, the job), and there are things you don’t know, that I may never write about. We changed our minds, we changed our habits, we changed how we spend our time, the paths we tread. 

One by one, we’ve let our children go to places where they could thrive. I took a new job that basically dropped into my lap, and I was filled with doubt about whether our family could cope until my husband said, “If it’s just about the logistics, we can handle logistics.” This spring, we didn’t order new ducklings or chicks. This summer, we traveled for almost an entire month: Because the children are older it was more fun than ever, and for the first time I didn’t feel overwhelming guilt about my messy gardens!

Now I wake at dawn and get myself and my 11-year-old daughter ready for school. We are the first to leave the house; we drive almost an hour north to Burlington, to the school where we stay until late afternoon. In a couple of months, we will do all our driving in the dark. And while we are gone, the rest of our family scatters to their schools, until we reconvene around the dinner table.

This could not be further from the life I was designing over the past decade, but it’s the life that our family needs now. It is not always easy, but everyone is thriving in their own way. Was I wrong before? Am I wrong now? No, and no. Everything just changed.

Driving north over the past week, my daughter and I listened to a gorgeous audio book (The Eyes and the Impossible by Dave Eggers, read by Ethan Hawke – highly recommended!) A thick layer of mist was spread over the valleys as the orange sun rose, and through the mist rose one of my favorite signs of fall: murmurations of starlings. These clouds of small black birds flowed in one direction and then shifted course abruptly, moving through the air as one unit in time to signals only they could discern.

The starlings make change into a dance, and they reminded me of the closing lines of Wendell Berry’s poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front:” Be like the fox /who makes more tracks than necessary / some in the wrong direction. / Practice resurrection. 

I never thought that those two sentences might be connected before; I always treated them as part of a laundry list of suggestions for rebelling against a culture of conformity. But now I wonder: Is the fox’s practice, like the starlings, of doubling back, changing its mind, a necessary part of “practicing resurrection?” Just as a transition is necessary for our first birth, it follows that change is necessary for all of our subsequent rebirths. 

So, let’s labor on. And if you have the chance this week, thank a teacher: They are working so very hard and heroically. 

Faith Gong has worked as an elementary school teacher, a freelance photographer, and a nonprofit director. She lives in Middlebury with her husband, five children, assorted chickens and ducks, one feisty cat, and two quirky dogs. In her “free time,” she writes for her blog, The Pickle Patch.