THE DELICATE PUNCTUATION OF PARENTHOOD
it's all plaintive wishes and educated
guesses.
Perhaps the best piece of parenting advice my
mother ever gave me, one that has served me well lo these past twelve years and
especially well lo these past two weeks, was simply this:
Use common sense, and follow your own
instincts. This direction does, of course,
assume that the receiver actually possesses enough common sense to produce
instincts worth following — which is an assumption as blind as it is
foolhardy, if the malfeasance that these days passes for parenting is any
reliable indicator. But my mother will tell you she had no such concerns about
me — she had, after all, spent the previous twenty-five years of her life
carefully cultivating those qualities within me — and that she always knew
I would make a great father. I, however, was not so
sure.
I’d always been capable and comfortable and confident — maybe, at times, a little too much so — in everything I did. I was happy and accomplished and reasonably successful, a guy blessed with God-given natural talents, some great direction from wonderful parents and teachers, and a determination to work and try and keep trying as hard as I had to to make something work. But staying up late to polish off a short story and solve some physics problems was one thing. And thriving in college and getting a grad school fellowship was another. But taking — or, more accurately, sharing — full responsibility for the physical and emotional and spiritual growth and strength and health of another human being (and then another) was something else entirely: a task so great, so daunting, so vaguely and unimaginably ludicrous that I may as well have been readying myself to swim across the Atlantic Ocean or build a skyscraper with my bare hands or bring lasting peace to the Middle East. None of it seemed remotely possible or plausible, much less probable.
Oh, sure — you might get a mile or two off-shore, maybe lay a good foundation and finish the first floor, maybe even stop the missiles from flying for a couple of months, but you could never really relax or take a break or enjoy what you’ve already done, because you’re dancing on the edge of destruction, always one little cramp away from drowning, one faulty joist away from total collapse, one bombing or kidnapping away from a bloody, open war. Parenting seemed to me a task that both demanded and precluded perfection. You knew you couldn’t possibly do it, at least not as well or as right as you wanted to, but here you were trying it anyway. And it seemed like the best you could ever hope to achieve was a fine, noble failure.
There were diapers to be changed and bottles to be filled. Baths to be given and pediatricians to be chosen. Asses to be wiped and circumcision dressings to be (ever-so-carefully) changed. Clothes to be bought and books to be read and trips to be taken and burps to be coaxed and games to be played and scrapes to be healed and shots to be given and antibiotics to be measured and piss and puke and shit to be cleaned and evil, soul-sucking roto-viruses to be endured. And that was the easy stuff. The read-and-react, stimulus-and-response, gotta-do-it-so-you-better-get-to-it stuff. You could worry that you didn’t feed him enough or didn’t wipe him clean enough, that he was too hot or too cold or too gassy, that he was sick and getting sicker and that if you didn’t get him to keep this Pedialyte down or that suppository up he was gonna have to go to the hospital for an IV whether or not you had time to change or shower or get the vomit out of your hair. It was the stuff you just did and didn't have a lot of time to worry about, because it all happened so often and so fast that it was more or less out of your control anyway. And so, should anything go wrong, you couldn't really take the blame; you were just along for the ride.
But then one day you’re driving up Fifth Avenue, and another car swerves into your lane and cuts you off and makes you jam on your brakes and sigh in disgust, and before you can get back to speed an angelic little voice from the backseat says, One asshole pass my car!, and you realize, through a haze of pride (you’ve never used that sentence in your life, so your three-year-old has already begun to master syntax and sentence grammar) and disgust (language acquisition aside, your three-year-old just said asshole) and joy (your three-year-old is tremendously smart and acute and active and perceptive for his age) and fear (you stopped swearing in front of him months ago; what else has he picked up and absorbed and retained that could one day come back to haunt or embarrass you when you least expect it?) and confusion (so what does this mean for him, for you, for everything you thought you knew about his development?), that the bigger, messier, scarier stuff would be coming along much sooner than you think. And that when it does — if it hasn’t already — it’s gonna get even wilder and crazier and a whole lot deadlier, like some wide-open, wild-west town where you can do pretty much anything you want, but where you have to remember that some day, some time, any one of those anythings you did can come back around and, if you’re not careful, get you jumped in a saloon or run out of town or maybe even shot in the back. And you can’t go running to the Sheriff for protection, because even he doesn’t know what the laws are, and he probably wouldn’t enforce ‘em if he did.
So you try to figure 'em out for yourself.
How do you know when your son is old enough to watch tv? To play on a computer? To cross the street without holding your hand? How do you know when it’s okay for him to jump in a pool or leap off a swing or run down a slide without getting hurt? How do you know when to say yes, when to say no, when to think about it some more and make the decision later? How do you find that balance between treating and spoiling, between permitting and indulging, between protecting and over-protecting? How do you know when he's old enough to go to a hockey game or stay home alone, big enough to see Jaws for the first time or drink Pepsi for dinner? How do you know when he’s ready to sleep over at a friend’s house or ride his bike to the playground or walk to the library by himself? How do you know, once you decide any or all of these things, that you made the right choice? That you didn’t just make some boneheaded decision that will hurt him now or that might hurt him later or that could, in the long run, scar him for life and make him resent you forever?
You don’t. You never do. And you probably never will. At least not for certain, anyway. And that’s what makes it all so maddening.
You’ll have a guess or a glimpse or a clue — he enjoyed the game; he didn’t have any nightmares from the movie; he made it home alive from the library — and you’ll be able to see the big picture, the sweet and smart and sensitive young man he’s becoming. But you’re always left to wonder if there’s something unknown or unseen, something waiting to be unleashed next month, next week, next decade. Will he always hate horror movies because they scared him as a child? Will he one day need a couple of root canals because of the sugar you let him eat and drink? Will he grow up to be overly cautious, maybe even a little neurotic, because you were always badgering him to slow down and stop running and watch where he was going after that time he fell and split his head open on the corner of his bed? Where do you draw the lines? How much is too much? What’s the best way to do or say or explain something? When is too late? When is too soon? Why must these simple acts of love and devotion be always be so fucking complicated?
It would be great, I used to think, if kids came with a manual, a simple little instruction book like the kind you get with a computer or a tv or a toaster oven. Some flow charts, some FAQs, maybe a little troubleshooting guide in the back. A few simple rules, a couple of diagrams, and a whole host of directions you could follow whenever a solution wasn’t perfectly obvious. (Should I let him play in traffic? Well, I can handle that one. But what if he wants to stay out after dark and play basketball with his friends at a public playground a couple of miles from home in the summer when the temperature is over 80 degrees? Then what do I do?) Of course you can — and if you’re smart, you do — consult your spouse, your parents, your pediatrician; you love them and respect their judgment, but they’re still a bunch of perfectly imperfect, trial-and-error, working-without-a-net types just like you. And, sure, you can always turn to Mr. Rogers or Dr. Spock or those great What to Expect books, but a hell of a lot of the time — which is to say, much more often than you would like — the advice or the diagnosis or the 19-page index doesn’t match the situation you’re facing or the questions you’re asking, so they don’t have the answers that deep down in your gut you knew they wouldn’t have but still, as you flipped intently through their glossy pages, somehow sort of hoped that they might surprise you. Because you’d give or pay or cut off any one of your most precious body parts to get the right answers, if only so you didn’t have to come up with them — and thus take full responsibility for them — yourself.
But then my Mom, whose thoughts and advice on these matters are as close to unfailing wisdom as you are likely to find, and who — as you would expect from someone who believes so fully in the importance of looking within instead of without — steadfastly believes you can’t learn to be a good parent by reading a book any more than you can learn to be a good teacher by talking to a school board member, this week reminded me that The people who need the manual wouldn't bother to read it. And the people who would read it don't really need it anyway.
If she’s right — and she usually is — then maybe being aware of the questions, maybe just thinking and caring about the differences, is enough. Maybe that’s all you really need. Maybe that simple awareness and maddening concern are sign enough that, yes, you’re doing things right no matter how you do them, as long as you do them. And care to do them. Maybe the most important part of doing a good job as a parent is just thinking and wondering and worrying about being a parent. If there are no right or easy answers, then all you have are the tough questions. And if you’re willing to ask those questions, then maybe you already have all the answers you seek.
I am fond of telling my students — in fact, I told them again last night — that good communication is a command of choices at every level, and that the best way to make those choices — of structure, organization, diction, syntax, even punctuation — is to imagine, and then to try and understand, all the potential outcomes, all the net gains and losses and subsequent complications of them, and then to choose the one that works best and makes the most sense for you. I am also fond of reminding them that, while there are always a few clear and obvious wrong choices, there are precious few clear and obvious right ones. There are degrees and measures and nuances of right — if I use this anecdote in the beginning, I have a great grabber; if I use it in the middle, I can re-hook and re-energize my audience when they’re least likely to be listening to me; if I save it for the end, I have a pathos-driven clincher that will make my conclusion resonate long after I’ve finished speaking; no one is better than the others, but they are different and so too are the results I'll gain from them — and so there are degrees and measures and nuances of returns. All of our choices, I am constantly reminding my students, have consequences. And no matter what we ultimately do or choose, we need to be ready for what follows after.
This is also good advice for us to give our children. And, perhaps, for us to give ourselves as parents. Because if we are indeed defined by our choices, then we're really defined by our consequences. And if we, whether as parents or as children, are going to be defined by our consequences, then there can’t possibly be a guide or a manual or a set of instructions. Because every child and every parent and every family and every situation are different. Because every choice comes with its own set of rules and laws and logic, with its own set of benchmarks and measuring sticks and metrics, and so, like most things in life and love, is not an absolute. Each one is a pure and defiant and often maddening relativity, a judgment made for one particular child in one particular place at one particular time. You can calibrate the distances and measure the crosswinds and try like hell to project a destination, but in the end, all you really need is a little patience, a little temperance, and a whole lot of faith in the sudden and simple and often incomprehensible workings of your own inner compass. Then you aim, you take your best shot, and you wait to see where it lands.
If you're paying any attention at all, it's not long before you realize — perhaps this is a worry, perhaps it is a comfort — that parents and children and their choices are always landing all over the map. Even when that map is filled with missile strikes and impact craters.
An article in yesterday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, at once both fascinating and horrifying, illustrates this point as well and as starkly as anything I can imagine. At odds in the piece were two different sets of parents whose children are right now vacationing in Israel. One mother and father who helped to organize a teen mission admitted it was a difficult decision to end the trip eleven days early and bring everyone home, all the more so because their son and daughter opposed it. But when rockets are flying and bombs are dropping over the heads of your children, the choices and consequences seem clear enough: Unhappy as we are about this, it was the prudent decision. And so it was. Unless, of course, you're the kind of mother who thinks everything, including demolished buildings and civilian casualties, is a valuable learning experience: My feelings change by the hour. I'm a little nervous, but she's getting a lot out of it and insists that she's safe in Jerusalem and wants to stay. We can only hope her daughter never says she's getting a lot out of an abusive boyfriend or a drug addiction or a compulsion to kill small children.
I, for now, have only an older son with a compulsion to go to a sleepaway camp, something Wendy and I investigated and deliberated and, aided by the fortuitous intersection of new friends and new opportunities and an old, well-established program, decided the time was right. And so, for the last ten days — more than twice his longest separation from us; the last time he was with my parents, which is as good as, and probably even better than, being at home — Adam has been playing and climbing and swimming and hiking and boating and camping, going wild in the woods of Western PA, while I have been padding around the house, marvelling at the quiet, missing him in the moments when I least expect to, and imagining that this is, in some small and modest way, what sending him to college will feel like. After the first few days, and especially after that first letter — Camp has been really cool so far — arrived in the mailbox, I stopped worrying about where he was and what he was doing and how he was feeling, stopped wondering whether he might get hurt on the trail of courage or get freaked out by the zip line or simply roll over in the middle of the night and fall out of the top bunk he’d so quickly and cavalierly chosen for himself. None of that has happened, of course. By all accounts — hastily scribbled in notes sealed and mailed between awesome activities — he's safe and healthy and happy, learning and growing and becoming a little more independent than he already is. Which is, of course, as wonderful as it is frightening.
I’d like to say that I saw it all coming, that I knew that every moment of camp would be perfect, just as I’d planned and forseen it and commanded it. But I’d be lying, and you would know it. All I could do was know and talk to Adam, to find out what he liked and what he thought and what he wanted, to think about who he was and how he was and where he was going and what I thought he was ready for. Then I checked out the camp and talked to some folks who’d been there and sent their children there and were more than happy to do so again. And then I — with Wendy, and with a little help from my parents — pondered a seemingly infinite set of choices and outcomes and consequences, all to produce the maddening structure and organization and diction and syntax of one more decision that, in the end, was nothing more than a plaintive wish and an educated guess.
But most times, that's all you need. Which is good, because that's all you ever get.
In the end, whether we're deciding what movie to see or what behavior to allow, whether to go to a summer camp or to come home from a war zone, all we’re left with, all we really have to help us plot and chart and navigate our way through the endless sentences and paragraphs and big, empty pages of our children’s lives, is this delicate punctuation of parenthood, the blessed breaks and stops and starts that help us make sense of such a messy, sloppy, perfectly imperfect process. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can freeze the rushing narrative of time long enough to step back and catch a glimpse, a preview, a momentary divination of a glorious work in progress, the beautiful assemblage of choices and consequences and new-found freedoms that will one day be and tell the whole story of our children. And if we’re really lucky, we can see a little of our parenting selves reflected back at us: the hopes and the dreams, the concerns and the promises and the successes, and maybe, just maybe, some carefully cultivated common sense and the inscrutable, inviolable instincts that follow from it.
I’d always been capable and comfortable and confident — maybe, at times, a little too much so — in everything I did. I was happy and accomplished and reasonably successful, a guy blessed with God-given natural talents, some great direction from wonderful parents and teachers, and a determination to work and try and keep trying as hard as I had to to make something work. But staying up late to polish off a short story and solve some physics problems was one thing. And thriving in college and getting a grad school fellowship was another. But taking — or, more accurately, sharing — full responsibility for the physical and emotional and spiritual growth and strength and health of another human being (and then another) was something else entirely: a task so great, so daunting, so vaguely and unimaginably ludicrous that I may as well have been readying myself to swim across the Atlantic Ocean or build a skyscraper with my bare hands or bring lasting peace to the Middle East. None of it seemed remotely possible or plausible, much less probable.
Oh, sure — you might get a mile or two off-shore, maybe lay a good foundation and finish the first floor, maybe even stop the missiles from flying for a couple of months, but you could never really relax or take a break or enjoy what you’ve already done, because you’re dancing on the edge of destruction, always one little cramp away from drowning, one faulty joist away from total collapse, one bombing or kidnapping away from a bloody, open war. Parenting seemed to me a task that both demanded and precluded perfection. You knew you couldn’t possibly do it, at least not as well or as right as you wanted to, but here you were trying it anyway. And it seemed like the best you could ever hope to achieve was a fine, noble failure.
There were diapers to be changed and bottles to be filled. Baths to be given and pediatricians to be chosen. Asses to be wiped and circumcision dressings to be (ever-so-carefully) changed. Clothes to be bought and books to be read and trips to be taken and burps to be coaxed and games to be played and scrapes to be healed and shots to be given and antibiotics to be measured and piss and puke and shit to be cleaned and evil, soul-sucking roto-viruses to be endured. And that was the easy stuff. The read-and-react, stimulus-and-response, gotta-do-it-so-you-better-get-to-it stuff. You could worry that you didn’t feed him enough or didn’t wipe him clean enough, that he was too hot or too cold or too gassy, that he was sick and getting sicker and that if you didn’t get him to keep this Pedialyte down or that suppository up he was gonna have to go to the hospital for an IV whether or not you had time to change or shower or get the vomit out of your hair. It was the stuff you just did and didn't have a lot of time to worry about, because it all happened so often and so fast that it was more or less out of your control anyway. And so, should anything go wrong, you couldn't really take the blame; you were just along for the ride.
But then one day you’re driving up Fifth Avenue, and another car swerves into your lane and cuts you off and makes you jam on your brakes and sigh in disgust, and before you can get back to speed an angelic little voice from the backseat says, One asshole pass my car!, and you realize, through a haze of pride (you’ve never used that sentence in your life, so your three-year-old has already begun to master syntax and sentence grammar) and disgust (language acquisition aside, your three-year-old just said asshole) and joy (your three-year-old is tremendously smart and acute and active and perceptive for his age) and fear (you stopped swearing in front of him months ago; what else has he picked up and absorbed and retained that could one day come back to haunt or embarrass you when you least expect it?) and confusion (so what does this mean for him, for you, for everything you thought you knew about his development?), that the bigger, messier, scarier stuff would be coming along much sooner than you think. And that when it does — if it hasn’t already — it’s gonna get even wilder and crazier and a whole lot deadlier, like some wide-open, wild-west town where you can do pretty much anything you want, but where you have to remember that some day, some time, any one of those anythings you did can come back around and, if you’re not careful, get you jumped in a saloon or run out of town or maybe even shot in the back. And you can’t go running to the Sheriff for protection, because even he doesn’t know what the laws are, and he probably wouldn’t enforce ‘em if he did.
So you try to figure 'em out for yourself.
How do you know when your son is old enough to watch tv? To play on a computer? To cross the street without holding your hand? How do you know when it’s okay for him to jump in a pool or leap off a swing or run down a slide without getting hurt? How do you know when to say yes, when to say no, when to think about it some more and make the decision later? How do you find that balance between treating and spoiling, between permitting and indulging, between protecting and over-protecting? How do you know when he's old enough to go to a hockey game or stay home alone, big enough to see Jaws for the first time or drink Pepsi for dinner? How do you know when he’s ready to sleep over at a friend’s house or ride his bike to the playground or walk to the library by himself? How do you know, once you decide any or all of these things, that you made the right choice? That you didn’t just make some boneheaded decision that will hurt him now or that might hurt him later or that could, in the long run, scar him for life and make him resent you forever?
You don’t. You never do. And you probably never will. At least not for certain, anyway. And that’s what makes it all so maddening.
You’ll have a guess or a glimpse or a clue — he enjoyed the game; he didn’t have any nightmares from the movie; he made it home alive from the library — and you’ll be able to see the big picture, the sweet and smart and sensitive young man he’s becoming. But you’re always left to wonder if there’s something unknown or unseen, something waiting to be unleashed next month, next week, next decade. Will he always hate horror movies because they scared him as a child? Will he one day need a couple of root canals because of the sugar you let him eat and drink? Will he grow up to be overly cautious, maybe even a little neurotic, because you were always badgering him to slow down and stop running and watch where he was going after that time he fell and split his head open on the corner of his bed? Where do you draw the lines? How much is too much? What’s the best way to do or say or explain something? When is too late? When is too soon? Why must these simple acts of love and devotion be always be so fucking complicated?
It would be great, I used to think, if kids came with a manual, a simple little instruction book like the kind you get with a computer or a tv or a toaster oven. Some flow charts, some FAQs, maybe a little troubleshooting guide in the back. A few simple rules, a couple of diagrams, and a whole host of directions you could follow whenever a solution wasn’t perfectly obvious. (Should I let him play in traffic? Well, I can handle that one. But what if he wants to stay out after dark and play basketball with his friends at a public playground a couple of miles from home in the summer when the temperature is over 80 degrees? Then what do I do?) Of course you can — and if you’re smart, you do — consult your spouse, your parents, your pediatrician; you love them and respect their judgment, but they’re still a bunch of perfectly imperfect, trial-and-error, working-without-a-net types just like you. And, sure, you can always turn to Mr. Rogers or Dr. Spock or those great What to Expect books, but a hell of a lot of the time — which is to say, much more often than you would like — the advice or the diagnosis or the 19-page index doesn’t match the situation you’re facing or the questions you’re asking, so they don’t have the answers that deep down in your gut you knew they wouldn’t have but still, as you flipped intently through their glossy pages, somehow sort of hoped that they might surprise you. Because you’d give or pay or cut off any one of your most precious body parts to get the right answers, if only so you didn’t have to come up with them — and thus take full responsibility for them — yourself.
But then my Mom, whose thoughts and advice on these matters are as close to unfailing wisdom as you are likely to find, and who — as you would expect from someone who believes so fully in the importance of looking within instead of without — steadfastly believes you can’t learn to be a good parent by reading a book any more than you can learn to be a good teacher by talking to a school board member, this week reminded me that The people who need the manual wouldn't bother to read it. And the people who would read it don't really need it anyway.
If she’s right — and she usually is — then maybe being aware of the questions, maybe just thinking and caring about the differences, is enough. Maybe that’s all you really need. Maybe that simple awareness and maddening concern are sign enough that, yes, you’re doing things right no matter how you do them, as long as you do them. And care to do them. Maybe the most important part of doing a good job as a parent is just thinking and wondering and worrying about being a parent. If there are no right or easy answers, then all you have are the tough questions. And if you’re willing to ask those questions, then maybe you already have all the answers you seek.
I am fond of telling my students — in fact, I told them again last night — that good communication is a command of choices at every level, and that the best way to make those choices — of structure, organization, diction, syntax, even punctuation — is to imagine, and then to try and understand, all the potential outcomes, all the net gains and losses and subsequent complications of them, and then to choose the one that works best and makes the most sense for you. I am also fond of reminding them that, while there are always a few clear and obvious wrong choices, there are precious few clear and obvious right ones. There are degrees and measures and nuances of right — if I use this anecdote in the beginning, I have a great grabber; if I use it in the middle, I can re-hook and re-energize my audience when they’re least likely to be listening to me; if I save it for the end, I have a pathos-driven clincher that will make my conclusion resonate long after I’ve finished speaking; no one is better than the others, but they are different and so too are the results I'll gain from them — and so there are degrees and measures and nuances of returns. All of our choices, I am constantly reminding my students, have consequences. And no matter what we ultimately do or choose, we need to be ready for what follows after.
This is also good advice for us to give our children. And, perhaps, for us to give ourselves as parents. Because if we are indeed defined by our choices, then we're really defined by our consequences. And if we, whether as parents or as children, are going to be defined by our consequences, then there can’t possibly be a guide or a manual or a set of instructions. Because every child and every parent and every family and every situation are different. Because every choice comes with its own set of rules and laws and logic, with its own set of benchmarks and measuring sticks and metrics, and so, like most things in life and love, is not an absolute. Each one is a pure and defiant and often maddening relativity, a judgment made for one particular child in one particular place at one particular time. You can calibrate the distances and measure the crosswinds and try like hell to project a destination, but in the end, all you really need is a little patience, a little temperance, and a whole lot of faith in the sudden and simple and often incomprehensible workings of your own inner compass. Then you aim, you take your best shot, and you wait to see where it lands.
If you're paying any attention at all, it's not long before you realize — perhaps this is a worry, perhaps it is a comfort — that parents and children and their choices are always landing all over the map. Even when that map is filled with missile strikes and impact craters.
An article in yesterday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, at once both fascinating and horrifying, illustrates this point as well and as starkly as anything I can imagine. At odds in the piece were two different sets of parents whose children are right now vacationing in Israel. One mother and father who helped to organize a teen mission admitted it was a difficult decision to end the trip eleven days early and bring everyone home, all the more so because their son and daughter opposed it. But when rockets are flying and bombs are dropping over the heads of your children, the choices and consequences seem clear enough: Unhappy as we are about this, it was the prudent decision. And so it was. Unless, of course, you're the kind of mother who thinks everything, including demolished buildings and civilian casualties, is a valuable learning experience: My feelings change by the hour. I'm a little nervous, but she's getting a lot out of it and insists that she's safe in Jerusalem and wants to stay. We can only hope her daughter never says she's getting a lot out of an abusive boyfriend or a drug addiction or a compulsion to kill small children.
I, for now, have only an older son with a compulsion to go to a sleepaway camp, something Wendy and I investigated and deliberated and, aided by the fortuitous intersection of new friends and new opportunities and an old, well-established program, decided the time was right. And so, for the last ten days — more than twice his longest separation from us; the last time he was with my parents, which is as good as, and probably even better than, being at home — Adam has been playing and climbing and swimming and hiking and boating and camping, going wild in the woods of Western PA, while I have been padding around the house, marvelling at the quiet, missing him in the moments when I least expect to, and imagining that this is, in some small and modest way, what sending him to college will feel like. After the first few days, and especially after that first letter — Camp has been really cool so far — arrived in the mailbox, I stopped worrying about where he was and what he was doing and how he was feeling, stopped wondering whether he might get hurt on the trail of courage or get freaked out by the zip line or simply roll over in the middle of the night and fall out of the top bunk he’d so quickly and cavalierly chosen for himself. None of that has happened, of course. By all accounts — hastily scribbled in notes sealed and mailed between awesome activities — he's safe and healthy and happy, learning and growing and becoming a little more independent than he already is. Which is, of course, as wonderful as it is frightening.
I’d like to say that I saw it all coming, that I knew that every moment of camp would be perfect, just as I’d planned and forseen it and commanded it. But I’d be lying, and you would know it. All I could do was know and talk to Adam, to find out what he liked and what he thought and what he wanted, to think about who he was and how he was and where he was going and what I thought he was ready for. Then I checked out the camp and talked to some folks who’d been there and sent their children there and were more than happy to do so again. And then I — with Wendy, and with a little help from my parents — pondered a seemingly infinite set of choices and outcomes and consequences, all to produce the maddening structure and organization and diction and syntax of one more decision that, in the end, was nothing more than a plaintive wish and an educated guess.
But most times, that's all you need. Which is good, because that's all you ever get.
In the end, whether we're deciding what movie to see or what behavior to allow, whether to go to a summer camp or to come home from a war zone, all we’re left with, all we really have to help us plot and chart and navigate our way through the endless sentences and paragraphs and big, empty pages of our children’s lives, is this delicate punctuation of parenthood, the blessed breaks and stops and starts that help us make sense of such a messy, sloppy, perfectly imperfect process. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can freeze the rushing narrative of time long enough to step back and catch a glimpse, a preview, a momentary divination of a glorious work in progress, the beautiful assemblage of choices and consequences and new-found freedoms that will one day be and tell the whole story of our children. And if we’re really lucky, we can see a little of our parenting selves reflected back at us: the hopes and the dreams, the concerns and the promises and the successes, and maybe, just maybe, some carefully cultivated common sense and the inscrutable, inviolable instincts that follow from it.
Posted: Wed - July 19, 2006 at 10:03 PM
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Published On: Nov 30, 2007 03:57 PM
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Published On: Nov 30, 2007 03:57 PM