I am writing this post as the sun comes up. I am often out of bed this early, but this morning it's because I haven't BEEN to bed yet. I was headed that way - very much looking forward to some deep slumber - at about 10:30pm, when my phone rang with an urgent situation requiring me to drive to Toronto and back. I won't get into the nature of that trip, except to say that I just spent several hours of solo-driving during which I thought a lot about my kids while helping someone else through a tragedy involving one of theirs.
Here is what I thought ...
Katy and Jack are incredible people. Not just incredible kids who will one day become incredible people, but already -- coming into their early teens - truly incredible people in their own right.
And I realized how often I treat them like a project. Like balls of clay. Bundles of potential. As though everything now is "in order to someday". I'm not blaming myself, as this is a deeply conditioned attitude. Though we don't often consider it, that is our society's standard approach to dealing with our children.
"They don't know any better yet."
"This is just a phase."
"I can't wait until they look back on this and realize how foolish it was."
But what "this" is, whatever form "this" may take, IT IS THEIR LIFE. Right now. And it is as valid and real and important to them as anything is to me or to anyone else. I do them an enormous disservice trying to make them see things from my "wiser, more experienced perspective". To truly live, they need to be allowed to fully embrace THEIR perspective. At each and every stage of their lives.
Why is it so hard for me to back off and let them be themselves? I will put forth, of course, that I am only trying to save them pain and frustration (though a less flattering interpretation is that I am just as often trying to spare myself embarrassment and make myself look better through them). And helping them avoid serious harm is a valid and important role for a parent to play. But so many situations, far shy of life-threatening, are likely exactly the challenges they need in their own journies. We may hate their decisions, worry about the consequences, wish so much they had behaved differently. But they are not us. They can't live our lives and we can't live theirs.
So, that is what I thought a lot about tonight. And I am going to do my best to put that into play today and from now on. Knowing full well that I will fail miserably much of the time - it sometimes just seems soooooo much easier to fix things for them, save them some steps, and show them "the right way". But, as we eat breakfast together in about an hour, I am going to tell them how great they are, and how much I really do respect them, and ask them to remind me of these thoughts when I start being too "parenty".
Here are some thoughts from others, to remind me of this :) ... BTW, I stumbled on these while looking for a specific quotation that I really loved. Having not found it, you will have to take my word that someone (wiser than me) said something along the lines of ... "This younger generation is destroying our way of life as we know it. And we must help them, not stop them, as that is their job!"
Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously. (Alfie Kohn)
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation. (Pearl S. Buck)
Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers. (Lewis Mumford)
